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My long-standing pet peeve with #Mastodon is the post character limit which forces people to make threads like on #Twitter. Sure, it's 500 characters which reduces the numbers of posts strung together, but it still results in a worse experience since posts are individually delivered to recipients unlike Twitter where they are presented together.

On my side, Mastodon threads are rarely complete unless the last post of the thread was shared with me, or they were each individually interacted with. It didn't have to be like this!
#twitter #mastodon

reshared this

Astrobach :breadified:
Astrobach :breadified:  
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some instances allow longer posts.
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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And I'm glad, but the default limit to 500 characters is punitive. I'd rather have had it the other way, uncapped by default and the limit can be enabled later.
Astrobach :breadified:
Astrobach :breadified:  
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I personally like the limitation, but the great thing about this place is the variety of iterations to suit all tastes.
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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What does the limitation do for you?
Astrobach :breadified:
Astrobach :breadified:  
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people who do not write for a living tend to ramble in text. The limit forces people to be brief which means I can engage with more ideas and ask questions if that person interests me. I remember LiveJournal and how you'd read like... Two short stories from two friends about it their days and miss most of my feed.

Also, I think the limits reduces the cost of hosting, but don't quote me on that.
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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I'm not sure about this. People were writing threads with Twitter's 140 characters limit, they kept writing threads with Twitter's 280 characters limit, and they now are writing threads with Mastodon's 500 characters limit.

Of course I can't know for sure how much longer posts would be without this default limit in place, but what I do know is that this limit isn't the end-all-be-all of microblogging given the continued existence of multipart threads.

As for the performance gain of shorter posts, it is absolutely insignificant compared to the storage size requirement of uploaded images.
Astrobach :breadified:
Astrobach :breadified:  
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i thought long threads were silly, yes. But I would say those were mostly exceptions to the rule of people saying less than they might have otherwise. Admittedly, an unprovable thesis.
Oblomov
Oblomov  
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Well, Mastodon is a MICROBLOGGING platform, so the character limit makes sense.

If you're on the web interface, you can browse a full thread by opening a post in a separate tab or window. This should open it in the post's own instance and provide the full thread.

And I agree, it's quite cumbersome.
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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You're missing the point. People work around the character limit, which means they absolutely don't care what kind of blogging platform Mastodon is. The lack of formatting already makes it obvious it isn't suitable for longer-form articles. The character limit is just punitive.

Also please don't assume people you're replying to are using the Mastodon web interface (think about mobile apps), for example I'm not even using Mastodon at all! And while #Friendica does a good job at gathering threads, it can only do so much with the posts it knows about.
#friendica
Oblomov
Oblomov  
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Sorry, but I'm not missing the point, I'm just unconvinced that the character limit in #Mastodon is the fundamental issue, as much as the fact that there is no “best” answer to the question: who should #ActivityPub messages be delivered to?
Followers and mentions are the obvious answer, but anything beyond that is additional load on the network and servers, which becomes more and more important as the number of users and messages grows.

1/6
#activitypub #mastodon

Mark doesn't like this.

Oblomov
Oblomov  
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAICS, if one follows the #ActivityPub protocol in its most conservative sense, thread holes are inevitable regardless of platform, becase the only instance that is guaranteed to have the full thread is the host instance of the OP.
Any other instance will only have what they get through federation (i.e. messages from its users, to its users or by people followed by one of its users).

2/6
#activitypub
Oblomov
Oblomov  
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Platforms can backfill or use other APIs to retrieve the full graph of a post, but that's additional work that the platform chooses to do. So, how well does this extra work scale?
I applaud Friendica for doing this, since this undoubtedly improves the user experience, but how well will this scale when the number of users grows by a couple orders of magnitude? Especially when it can't use its own efficient API to do the filling?

3/6
Oblomov
Oblomov  
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The opportunity to backfill more is being discussed for some Mastodon features <https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34>), and by and large the main issue considered is: how much extra strain does this put on the network?
Personally I'd really much prefer the experience to be seamless for me as a user, but if this is implemented at a cost that ends up affecting the UX in other ways, is it worth it?

4/6

Backfill statuses from remote accounts when first subscribed · Issue #34 · mastodon/mastodon

GitHub
Oblomov
Oblomov  
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And it might be easy to dismiss the thing saying «yeah, but that's just because Mastodon is inefficient and the character limit compounds the issue by forcing people to post more messages», but that's only true up to a point. And I'd really like to see the distribution of thread message counts in #Mastodon vs #Friendica. I don't expect the Mastodon ones to be much higher on average than the Friendica ones.

5/6
#friendica #mastodon
Oblomov
Oblomov  
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FWIW, I fully agree with your “It didn't have to be like this”, but at best Mastodon's character limit is just something that makes some fundamental limitations of #ActivityPub more manifest. To me, it's in the same category as the need to open an external link in my instance context to be able to interact with the corresponding object.
Rather, one would have to ask why people insist on using the wrong platform (aside from lack of knowledge).

6/6
#activitypub
Oblomov
Oblomov  
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BTW, I'm curious what you mean by “Friendica can only do so much” when filling the whole thread. I assume it backtracks the inReplyTo chain up to the first post, and then use the self-replies and other-account-replies collections? What goes missing?
Or is the issue that you need to backtrack over potentially long inReplyTo chain in the first place? Would a link to the first post in the chain from anywhere down the chain help in this case?
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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The use case that sparked the original post is this: I follow A. They share the first post of a multi-part thread of B who I do not follow. As a result, I will only see this first post because we only backfill threads, we don't forwardfill them (thank Goodness and also there's no technical way of doing it yet that I know of).

As I said in my original post, if A had shared the last post in the multi-part thread, I would have gotten the full thread. If A had liked each post of the multi-part thread, I would have received it in full as well.

This requires A to behave in a certain way because B was working around the character limit. It's not a big deal, but it is a peeve.
Oblomov
Oblomov  
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(FWIW I think you can forward-fill by following the replies collections.)

But again, this has more to do with the way ActivityPub works than with the fact that Mastodon user split posts. Wouldn't you have the same issue Friendica-to-Friendica if not for the extra API to fetch the whole graph of a post+comments?
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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Yes, but on Friendica you just don’t need to make multi-part threads at all, which removes the problem.
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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I'm sorry, I didn't read your long thread, Mastodon is a MICROBLOGGING platform after all. 😛
Oblomov
Oblomov  
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Eh 8-)

I actually had someone switch to their Friendica account to post a long reply to me, but I don't have one and I'm not going to get one just to reply to you ;-)

Mark doesn't like this.

Trinsec @Qoto
Trinsec @Qoto  
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It depends on the instance. There are instances with a modified codebase, some have a big character limit. The one I'm on has a 65k limit for example.
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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That's great, but it doesn't remove the punitive default.
Trinsec @Qoto
Trinsec @Qoto  
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True that. Not much we can do about it I suspect.
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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But people don't use a blog, they use Mastodon to string together multi-part posts, which they only have to do because of the arbitrary post character limit. There's no underlying technical limitation, the limit itself can be lifted by each instance admin if they so do choose!
Schmaker
Schmaker  
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Who cares about character limit when you can get #Friendica? :D

Actually, i use one of my friendica categories as blogging platform with super-long articles (that propably nobody ever reads :D ), but it definitely works for me.
#friendica
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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And it's great, but you could do it also without the character limit, and people who don't particularly care could write their longer posts without slicing them!
Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem:
Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem:  
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@lanodan #Mastodon also doesn't support conversation IDs, which allows threads to easily be broken.

Gargron kept asserting that they weren't necessary, but the GNU Social devs before him learned the hard way that they fixed all sorts of problems.
#mastodon @Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:  
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@tk erm, I'm pretty sure Mastodon has support for them, just named context instead.

MissKey is the one that doesn't, because missed keys it is.
@Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem:
Ignas Kiela
Ignas Kiela  
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idk, never seen broken threads here, but I have seen them when I was still on masto
Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:  
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pleroma has reply fetching but well… it's not 100% effective.
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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Friendica has a couple addons for this. One is based off the number of characters in the post (Show More), the second is based off the visual height of the post (Show More Dynamic).
Hacker Factor
Hacker Factor  
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If you need longer, have you thought about a blog or Reddit? Short message conversations serve a different purpose than long essays.
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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I'm all set on Friendica, thank you very much. I wish the people who want longer in Mastodon could have longer out of the box so that I would get their complete post at once, not just a part of it.
Robert Lender
Robert Lender  
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@Hypolite Petovan I liked Twitters 140 Letters in times when Threads where not usual. But nowadays I prefer the non-Limits of friendica.
@Hypolite Petovan
Martijn Vos
Martijn Vos  
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I've always felt Twitter was a ridiculous platform for anything other than shouting into the void for exactly this reason. Yet people insist on posting very long and very interesting threads there, that are annoying to read because it's on Twitter.

Still, Cory Doctorow's posts (I think he's on Mastodon?) still show up neatly as long threads for me on Friendica, so it does seem to work fine, at least in his case.
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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If you follow the author, there’s no issue, but if you don’t and someone you follow only shares the first post, you’re out of luck for the rest.
chava
chava  
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I just find it hilarious that one of the people replying on this post used a multi-part thread when a single post could have sufficed.

Mark reshared this.

Rapist
Rapist  
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use better fediverse software, it's not rocket science
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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You’d be better at trolling if you didn’t miss the point by a mile, now fuck off.
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