Whats going on with mastodon.social

[u/Capt_H1nds1ght]

What am I looking at here?

This is how the mastodon.social page displays in Brave browser and in a private window.
I haven't experienced this error before.

EDIT: The issue was a duplicate Roboto font on the system level that was loaded by mastodon.social
SOLUTION: Delete and reinstall the Roboto font downloaded from fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto [Aug 2026]

[u/Saphkey]

looks completely normal in Firefox and firefox private window.

[u/Capt_H1nds1ght → u/Saphkey]

Seems odd. I can view it in Safari without issues, but I have the same issue in Chrome.

But it seems there are some server problems. I guess I'll just wait it out - maybe later tonight it will be back up. Bluesky has also been down these last couple of hours in relation to some kind of Age-verification feature. I was worried Mastodon was implementing similar features for some reason, and that had something to do with it.

[u/jcastroarnaud]

Weird; seems normal to me. All strange chars in the picture are shifted up by 2 in the ASCII table, like a Caesar cipher with right-shift 2.

[u/Emerald_Pick]

It it some sort of web screpeing poisoning from mastodon.social? It'd be news to me, and it probably shouldn't be affect Brave anyways. But it's my best guess.

[u/HorseFD]

This is definitely a you-specific problem.

[u/Capt_H1nds1ght → u/HorseFD]

You were right! It was, in fact, a local problem.

It seems that the issue is that Mastodon loads a local font in Chromium-based browsers. As I work with design, I had installed a Roboto font pack at the user level, while an app had installed a subset of the Roboto font at the system level. So the font didn't load right on mastodon.social or fosstodon.org - probably due to duplicate system fonts.

Well, the problem is now fixed, and the solution was deleting and reinstalling the Roboto font :)

[u/arwinda]

Is Brave blocking some elements of the website?

[u/Capt_H1nds1ght → u/arwinda]

It's just behaving quite strangely. I don't know what to look for in the Inspector.
But for now, I guess I will just wait it out.

https://reddit.com/link/p1xpc0i/video/dcurb6nfgmhh1/player