I can come over here to #Friencica and write long essays as my heart desires, but I, more often than not, do not feel like spending a lot of time on writing here because the visibility (and thus the effect) is severely limited, and it seems people get confused by long posts anyway.

Also Friendica handles multiple protocols so, in theory, I can send messages to a dozen federated networks, pleroma or else. Never have tried though. As far as I remember they all ose the same activitypub based protocol which is, as you amply phrased: meh.

I never have been a fan of Twitter, I have to confess that. I understand that people use microblogging to notice events, without spending the time to actually read about them. But I also noticed that they struggle with the micro-form when they want to say something which cannot fit into that extremely limited space. Mastodon is very much a functional clone of Twitter: microblogging with a goal very confusing to me. I can read messages, and sometimes react on them but they hardly ever contain real content, it's either bits of stuff with no context or external links to go over and read, to figure out even what the context is. I prefer a bit more information.

So, yeah, I write long posts if I want to. Usually I simply don't.