Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
Microblogging was a mistake.
An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
I will never actually implement it but sometimes I look at what the popularity of Twitter has done to the shapes of our conversations and I want to mandate a *minimum* post length here.
Mastodon's default limit of 500 is a start but not really enough. Every instance that raises the limit into the thousands of characters or beyond is doing a great thing by providing a way to wean people off of short, staccato exchanges and give them the opportunity for thought and nuance in a text box they have been trained to dump thoughts into. It looks short at first but it just keeps on growing and growing as your thought takes shape, and you can actually go back and *edit* the fucking thing.
But really I still miss when goddamn Livejournal was where all my online social shit happened. People could still be dicks on it, don't get me wrong! it wasn't set up to encourage and enforce hot takes, though; it wasn't built to make a ton of money by farming your outrage and stress and turning it into ad views!
(Which is really a problem with ALL modern social sites, everyone wants to become the next Zuckerfuck and there is no way to do that without strip-mining your users' attention. But I've sung that song more than once and don't care to sing it again today; I've got shit to do.)
(This post brought to you by watching a disagreement actually get *resolved* thanks to the power of replies that are long enough to have some fucking nuance, instead of blowing up into a multi-day shitstorm of too-short replies going back and forth.)
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
seriously, 500 is still a huge constraint. I pulled 7777 out of the air as the limit for here (with a little hack to require a CW-as-cut-tag on anything >777) and I've never hit it - though I do also have my blog, where I move things that start as a Really Long Toot.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@anthracite absolutely. I've moved my daily-use from my snouts account to here at cybrespace, and jumping from 500 to 1024 takes so much weight off my shoulders when I'm trying to consider what I'm going to say in a post. (I never got into twitter, though I tried it for a couple weeks. I basically only posted one-liners there before abandoning the account.)
I like the community-focused nature (and the build-your-own-community aspect) of mastodon a lot, because it means that, unlike traditional blogging of the livejournal mode (2002-12 in my case), you're presented with the option to socialize with a community as a priority over void-howling (though void-howling pops up in any internet communications medium)...
rambling, sorry. Just extremely pleased to be able to do so without having to chop a post up multiple times to be able to speak in complete sentences.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
I see you using the CW description as an <lj-cut> and you're valid XD
Re: 7777 with required CW on >777:
Do you have a how-to somewhere? @maffsie what are your thoughts on maybe increasing the qp limits?
https://github.com/egypturnash/mastodon/commit/b9586c79629756dd0332b17f74a3bd13dae39a3f - you'll have to fuss around with this a bit as it was done many versions back, but it should give you what you need if you're okay with digging into the code some.
@anthracite @pigsflew i'm not entirely sure how i feel about increasing the limits; on one hand i realise it's an arbitrary limit, but on the other i'm not super pleased with maintaining patches on top of the mastodon codebase (though I already /do/..)
i'll give it some thought.
re: Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@anthracite Amen to that. I'm way more active on Mastodon than I ever was on any other service, largely because of all that. Now if only I could get more of my social circle over here…
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
Yeah that second part is definitely the hard part. *sigh*
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@anthracite that's one thing that bugs me about hornblowers including Tumblr among Microblogging Platform lists. sure, there's nothing saying you can't make a one-word shitpost, but it actually handles up-to 100 hard returns per post, with an unknown text capacity. sure, there's problems with the UI and backend but it's not a microblog
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
Hell, most of what I get linked to Tumblr for is medium-length text pieces.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@anthracite @hyratel and wanting a return to long-form blogging is why I built Publ and why I’m spending less time on microbloggy social media these days, and why I am so annoyed at most of the IndieWeb and ActivityPub folks for basically building shitty Twitter over and over again.
The problem with Twitter isn’t that it’s corporate owned, the problem with it is that it’s a shitty way to communicate.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@fluffy @anthracite that's part of why I keep circling back to tumblr - long-form capability and mixed-media post types (inline embed pictures are superior to attached-at-end pictures, fight me)
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@hyratel @anthracite yeah I just wish tumblr had proper post privacy and if it weren’t a buggy, always-breaking mess with weird arbitrary restrictions on things.
But I’m more or less happy with my post on Publ, automatic cross post to Tumblr thing. It’s rough but it’s Good Enough.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@anthracite @hyratel yeah I agree. HTML is a pretty good delivery format. Really hate how much of ActivityPub is basically let’s reinvent the web the long way around. And badly.
Tumblr has some rough edges about inline photos vs photo sets, and that’s a thing I specifically decided to avoid in Publ. A photo set is just a collection of images and they can go anywhere in an entry.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@fluffy @anthracite tumblr shifted to that at some point recently (look up "NPF" on uh, @ staff I think?) which makes all photoposts just inline photos with nothing ahead of them. NPF removes the internal differencing between types, it just templates, as best I understand
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@hyratel @anthracite oh, nice. I’m glad they finally fixed that. Now if only they could make quotation posts not terrible. :)
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@fluffy @anthracite as I understand it, quoteposts in NPF are just a monospace template on a generic post
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@hyratel the thing is that whenever reblogging a quote post, it behaves differently than other post types - it just adds onto the quotation stuff instead of providing attribution or quoting. Which is kind of ironic but also extremely obnoxious.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@fluffy here's the catch - NPF isn't retractive, so all the quoteposts made before NPF are still the original level of Jank
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@anthracite @hyratel I really want to find the time and spoons to build my new feed reader. I have ideas on how to make things better and also there’s FINALLY some consensus building around how to support private/friends-only posts in a syndication context. (And of course private/restricted posts were also a major fundamental design to Publ, and it’s working pretty okay. But could be better.)
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@anthracite I miss livejournal so much.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
It's still there. But it's owned by Russians and queers are officially Illegal there now and all my friends left anyway. First for drifting away to Twitter - all those "here's my tweets of today" robo-posts, ugh - and then mostly to G+ when it was clear that LJ was a sinking ship, and then just... nowhere, really, once G+ chased off everyone who wasn't using a "real name".
And there's Dreamwidth. But gah, getting everyone back onto it, ugggh. I don't have anywhere near enough of a critical mass to even bother looking, so it's just a place my blog auto-clones to and I never check.
So many people are just on Fucking Facebook and, aaaaaggggghhhh.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@anthracite Yeah. Pretty much my entire livejournal social circle moved to Facebook.
I didn't know that being queer is officially illegal on livejournal now. How horrible...
I have a dreamwidth that imported all my posts... But that's really it.
re: Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@anthracite @pandora_parrot I have a DW account that I ported my LJ to... and that I only make long-form private record-keeping posts on. >________< I really should get into the habit of using that more often...
re: Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
ironic but succinct response
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
Yeah that is a bad thing in every site that has one. Just show me recent posts and expose conversations I’m in.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
OMG, this. Twitter was a freaking disaster for my brain.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
As designed! Or rather, as it evolved to be as it sought ways to make back the huge amounts of VC it had to pay back in order to have a fuckton of engineers paying Bay Area rents.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
The insistence on "pedigree" by tech employers in the Bay Area ("only these schools" or "only these companies") did so much to poison the well, drive up rents and salaries ("I went to Stanford so pay me!") prevent diverse teams, and allow white supremacy to fester.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@anthracite Not to mention properly distilling a thought into a shorter post is *hard*. And, frankly, most people just aren't up to it.
To quote Mark Twain, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."
OTOH, given a significant percentage of people have really bad reading comprehension skills, to some extent it doesn't matter how long the post is; they'll get out of it what they get…
re: Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@anthracite You’re right! Buuuut the problem is that a lot of the Fedi doesn’t support updating / editing yet. Posting something to fedi is the equivalent of carving it into granite until Update becomes more widely supported. So that’s why for blog posts I’m gonna make them as normal blog posts and link them here. This can be the “comment section” so to speak. Is this ideal? y/n — No! But that’s where we’re at.
re: Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
yeah god I wish Masto would fucking support it instead of the 'delete and repost' button, geez
all the youngsters are like "omg what if you edit to make people look like they are agreeing with something horrible" and, like, have an 'edited' note if you're worried about that ffs, we had editable posts back when forums ruled the earth and that was not a problem
re: Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@anthracite So much pain and misery could become avoided if we could say “You are right. Thank you for letting me know about that. I’ll edit the post”. There could be an edit history, IDK.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
The length of posts here is a constant huge boon and one we massively appreciate, and have from day one. Even with as short and not-eloquent we can be sometimes, having the space to expound on things and make things more clear has saved everyone a lot of headaches, we feel.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
<3
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@anthracite tbh, I have to struggle not to write an endless wall of text every time I reply to something. It’s a serious problem. I can’t expect anyone to read all that junk, when I only really wanted to say the last two sentences. Miniblogging (not micro) helps me choose my words more carefully, and say what I want to say without rambling or ranting.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
More than once I have filled a larger text box to the brim, then cut and paste my last sentences to the beginning and removed half of what I wrote on the way to them. Trying to GET to those last words without the space to write them in seems like an impossible task to me!
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
YEP. Which were the result of "it needs to fit into the size of an SMS", which is basically a number someone pulled out of their ass when building the SMS protocol. Or I think it was maybe just waste space in voice packets or something? Some utterly arbitrary constraint like that.
Microblogging was a mistake. An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.
@anthracite I've had far too many posts where I hit 500 by the time I get through the CW and the introductory sentence, it's baffling how anyone gets anything done at 500 or less.