Discussion
One of the weird and wonderful things about the Fediverse is the variance in max characters per instance.
Nonetheless, the norm among the people I follow is 500 characters. This has a kind of cadence to it. And so longer posts have the quality of a kind of cognitive assault. I know that’s not intended. But that is how it lands with me.
It’s not a big deal, but it’s not nothing and it is jarring
@urlyman In almost all cases, when I bump up against the 500 character limit, I find it's better to write the thing out into a blog post, then post the title and a condensed summary with a link to the article.
@pitrh that is what I should do, but
a) I have a bad habit
b) Mastodon is where I think out loud
@urlyman @pitrh I once maxed out my instance's 10,000 character limit, but I almost always remember to put a "spoiler warning" on longer posts so they don't hijack too much screen space. That one really should have been a blog post (even though I don't really have a real blog), and in fact I've been meaning to get around to posting it on my own website at some point.
My client (Tusky on Android) puts a "see more" automatically if things are too long, but I know not every client does.
@tiotasram thanks. My OP here is not a critique as such, or at least that’s not its intended emphasis.
It’s more that media takes a form and tends to develop norms and affordances. Breaking those is not ‘wrong’ per se, but it is pushing against the flow
@urlyman On the other hand, some people post a thread split into 15 or more 500 character items and set each item to public instead of setting the first post to public and the rest to unlisted. That makes a real mess of things if you're reading posts in reversed order
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