The fact that the mastodon devs put the content in the HTML but refuse to show the content tells me everything I need to know about mastodon. It may even be worse than twitter. Generally I will not go out of my way to use or view such links. I just close the tabs.

In my experience, Mastodon (and other relatives from its family) is much better than current Twitter, at least for non-logged-in users. On Mastodon, as long as you enable JavaScript, you can see the whole thread for the post, while Twitter (which also needs JavaScript) only shows the initial post; and if you go to an account's page, Mastodon shows the whole timeline in reverse-chronological order (which is generally what you want), while Twitter shows old posts in a random order.

I understand that POV and within it's context I agree. But to a non-JS user they are equivalent (Mastodon and Twitter) in functionality: blank pages telling you to execute random code. Very similar to phishing emails telling one to execute the random code attachment.

Twitter has to be bad by virtue of being a corporation driven by profit motive and requiring JS to collect and sell user data. Mastodon doesn't have to be crap since it is not required to generate maximum profit. It just chooses to be as shown from the content being in the HTML but hidden. This makes Mastodon worse. Either it's malicious or, more likely, incompetent cargo culting of corporate practices. Devs unable to separate themselves from the use-cases they have to develop for at their paid jobs or lacking the knowledge to do so.