Vertical writing for the Mongolian script on Mastodon

The Mongolian script is mainly used for Mongolian. The script is in daily use in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. The script mainly used in Mongolia is the Cyrillic script, but the Mongolian script is being reintroduced in Mongolia.

The Mongolian script should be displayed vertically, but vertical writing for the script is not well supported in most software. In particular, most global social media do not support vertical writing for the script. Therefore, Mongolian script users write sideways and post images containing Mongolian script text.

Therefore, I proposed and implemented partial support for the Mongolian script on Mastodon. I made it possible to display Mongolian script text vertically without changing the UI layout. This approach attracted attention and influenced other fediverse software. New users joined Mastodon because Mastodon supports vertical writing for the Mongolian script.

This talk is about the Mongolian script, issues that occurred in this approach, and the influence of this approach. This approach for internationalization demonstrates advantages of the Fediverse over proprietary global social media.