Small rant about small character limits in fedi, like #Mastodon's 500 limit, just because I had this discussion recently.
I think it makes no sense for the #fediverse. This is a criticism towards #ActivityPub as well, which defines notes as short posts, around a paragraph.
How did "microblogging" came to be? In the early internet we had no limitations like this. If you wanted to post something (say in a forum), you could usually just write what you wanted, as long as it needed to be (there might be technical limitations, but not a conscious limit of "you should express yourself in under xxx characters". How did this become a thing?
#Twitter started as a platform where you could post via SMS, hence the initial character limit was 140. But nowadays we don't have technical limitations like that. So why do software designers still feel the need to restrict users in such a way? I believe it is a failed concept, one that has been surpassed in practice. If people want to write 1000 or 5000 characters, they will. And they do. That's how "threads" are born. OK, sometimes a person consciously wants to split a post in parts, but most of the times it is just to go around the platform's character limit. So if the goal is to have a platform where people express themselves in 500 characters or less, then this design fails hard, because you can't force people to do that if they don't want to. If I want my posts to be short, I will make them short, no need to restrict me. If I want to make a longer post once in a while, I will also post it, I will just have to hit reply as many times as needed for all of my text to reach my followers.
The problem with this, besides that it's impractical and gets in the users' way, is that it actually does the opposite of what might be expected: Instead of not serving long texts to users, you serve them in multiple posts, creating clutter in the timeline. And this way they can't avoid getting the whole text in their timelines, even if it's something they are not interested in!
The simplest and most obvious way to handle this is letting users write their posts, however long they want to make them, and only show the first xxx characters in the timeline, with a "Show more" button. This way users can express themselves in the way they prefer (it's their wall/social feed after all!), and their followers are not served several consequential posts about something they might not care about. It's one opinion, one post, it should come to my timeline once, and then I can decide if I want to click on it and read all of it.
It's funny, but my early fediverse experience was vastly improved when @atomicpoet moved from mastodon.social to calckey.social. I loved reading his posts, but they tended to be long, so I would be online and a new post by Chris would come, and I'd be like "oh here we go again". Because it would fill up my timeline, and it wasn't practical either, because I would read the first paragraph, then wait until Chris typed the next paragraph, and in the meantime I might have seen other things and I had to go back to what I was reading 5 minutes ago and then wait 5 more minutes for the rest of his train of thought. This is not how any of this should work! A person should take their time and write down their thoughts, and then post them on their account. And I should be able to see the start of that post, and click on it and read it at its entirety if it seems interesting to me.
Why are we keeping up with an unnecessary limit, when there is no technical reason for it any more? Plain text takes practically zero disk space (and will take up the same space -basically more- if split in different posts). We post photos that take up kilobytes or megabytes.
When users are forced to go around your design in order to communicate their thoughts, this means there's something wrong with your design. There are people who prefer writing shorter posts. There are people who sometimes want to post something longer for their followers to read. It's still a post, it serves the exact same purpose, it's not like "posts MUST be short, anything over a paragraph is a blog post". I regularly write longer posts, because I want to expand on my thoughts. It doesn't mean I care about keeping a personal blog, or that I think anything longer I write is blog-worthy. I might be talking about whatever, and it can be as significant (or insignificant) as my one paragraph posts. It's even more futile to try to enforce a limit like that in an open network as the Fediverse. People will just build tools to overcome it, as has happened, and many platforms offer much longer character limits. Many Mastodon servers have also manually changed that limit, kolektiva.social for example is a Mastodon server with a 10K character limit. It comes from an actual need, people might also want to post an announcement or whatever longer text.
Basically, the only real reason I can think of for limits like that to exist in today's platforms, it's because short content is more easily "consumable". So I get it as a choice for #X or #Threads, they want addictive, fast-to-read content, witty responses etc to keep their users in their platforms for longer, to show them more ads and keep tracking their interactions for longer. And this is probably how they found out that this restriction is good for them and makes their platform more addictive. It's easier for them to "sell" easily digestable content. It makes sense as a design choice, for their corporate targets.
But why on fedi? If you don't care about longer posts, you can ignore them and not open them. If you prefer following people who only write short posts, then do that. If you don't like that I write longer posts, feel free to unfollow me, and customize your fedi experience to your needs. But why have made-up restrictions like that forced upon users? Are we building something for easily digestible content, trying to make it as addictive as possible, or are we here for communication, according to the users' needs?
@panos I’ve been thinking about this post the past day or so. I agree just sum it up and have a read more button. But! Reading a long post isn’t always comfortable in all apps. Tiny fonts, line spacing is bad, etc.
If apps could have a “read long posts as article” option with separate style settings that would be superb.
To prove my point, I just scrolled down through this in my greek firefish server. This post was interesting, with some info about the history of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain, I enjoyed reading it. In total the text was less than 20 lines. But it took up two and a half pages in my feed, as it had to come as four posts instead of one! Thank you, 500 character limit :BlobCat_Googly_Hammed:
Also, when the infrastructure isn’t in place for longer posts—e.g. Read More buttons—it can be really irritating when an entire blog post is pushed into my feed.
To me, fediverse is like a conversation. Let's say you have a group of 10 people meeting for 1h. Attention is scarce so the group decide a 6 minutes/person express time so everyone can talk and be listened: it's a matter of respect.
When someone break the 500 limit, I feel it like someone in the above meeting just talking 40 minutes. I understand you want/need that to express yourself but... you do not respect the attention span people consented to give you.
@lutindiscret I get your mindset, but I don't think the same logic applies. When someone speaks in a room, you are forced to listen to them. When you see a post that goes beyond the limit and "Show more" appears, you can instantly choose to skip it, if you don't want to put that time into it. Takes the same time to decide if you'll read it or not as every other post. On the contrary, multiple consequential posts which are made because of that limit, are what captures more of your attention than needed, as they can flood your timeline.
@panos@lutindiscret I think if we stopped thinking about the Fediverse as “Twitter replacement”, and thought of it more as “general social media replacement”, then we’d generally be more open about what the Fediverse can and cannot do.
This tech could replace everything social. If you want, it can be Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and even basic blogs.
What the Fediverse can’t do is be something like Adobe Flash where everything is exactly like so – which might piss off certain web designers obsessed with reproducing an experience in the exact same way again and again. But hey, we already have technology for that anyway.
All this in mind, I think we need to change expectations about what the Fediverse is.
@atomicpoet@panos here we are confusing two things: "fediverse" and "the part of fediverse that propose microblogging". I don't by the "fediverse can be anything" stuff and I see it more like different stuff/experiences. "threadiverse" for example is a thing. Microblogging fedi is another made by people who want to read short posts. The blogging fedi is another. (1/2)
@atomicpoet@panos It's not a whole. Different tools, different people, different expectations, different UX, different content and different cultures. Mastodon will never support events like Mobilizon does and that's ok. Its character limit is not a limit but a feature coming from a culture that values brievety, witness, laconism...
It's ok that the fedi is kind of split: we should not view the fedi as an everything app or it will fail 🤷 (2/2)
I think I will experiment with friendica this weekend. I got a couple of domains not doing anything at the moment, and a different take might be interesting to check out.
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