#UnpopularOpinion I don't like instances that allow far more than 500 characters per toot. #ActivityPub is not a blog platform. I tend to just scroll over posts that are too long. I didn't come here to read long texts. I think that toots should be short messages. With links if need to more persistent and retrievable content. Toots are meant to be more like short-lived status updates. Which is why I auto delete toots after a few days, unless they get traction.
@jwildeboer not true! #ActivityPub is a social protocol. We explicitly have a content type for long text (Article). AP is extensible to all kinds of content. The sky is the limit.
@evan@jwildeboer It’s kind of weird that the primary #ActivityPub implementations have been Twitter-style clones where a #FriendFeed style #lifestream would more accurately convey the content available.
I guess one complicating factor is that almost all #ActivityPub instances are for both publishing and consuming and as long as instances limits themselves to a 1:1 between what they can publish and what they can consume then #ActivityPub will have a hard time being extended in practice.
@evan@jwildeboer Not sure if you remember, but eg when I worked at Flattr and implemented OStatus there was a similar issue in that StatusNet / Identica only consumed Twitter-style content and since the Flattr-content wasn’t that we could never federate in practice.
@evan@jwildeboer Another complicating factor in extensibility was the inability to include alternative representations of an activity.
In Flattr’s case the “flattr” could be mapped to eg “like”, “give”, “purchase” but even that wouldn’t be truly accurate so a custom verb like “flattr” would have been better.
But the likelihood of other platforms supporting “like” is the highest and the inability to provide alternative representations meant the other more granular semantics were lost.
@jwildeboer I agree that longer posts definitely deserve to be (blog) posts that are linked to. That said, I don’t mind longer char limits for posts for when the need arises to post a longer thing. Fortunately, my mastodon client (Ivory) will truncate long posts. I can scroll right on past if I’m not interested in reading something long.
@jwildeboer Even on instances that only allow 500 characters, people can and will write more than that, in threads. The technical limit is entirely arbitrary and doesn't stop anyone, I believe you're focusing on the wrong thing.
@jwildeboer huh. I like having everything in one place. I don't really care how long it is. If I have to click out to read a blog somewhere else, I generally don't do it. If it is in my timeline, even if I have to click to expand it, I try to read it. Different strokes, I guess...
@jwildeboer I also think that micro blogging shouldn't be much longer than 500 characters and that it's probably not a good idea to enable longer posts in Mastodon (or Firefish or … ).
But I also think that ActivityPub shouldn't be limited to micro blogging and that there should be platforms that do support longer posts, more formatting, videos, streaming content, podcasts, calendar entries, book reviews etc …
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