Since starting this GoToSocial instance, I’ve made several long-winded posts (and replies). Some examples…

Each of these I’m referring to exceed Mastodon’s 500 character post/reply limit. If it wasn’t for me having this instance, which gives me ample room to say what I want to say in a single post, you would have had seen these posts broken up into a threaded series. One of these posts was some 6000+ characters long, which would have necessitated ~13 individual posts to get my point across. Spam much? This is what I don’t understand about folks here who say they don’t want increased post limits, or from the Masto devs who seemingly refuse to budge on this issue. If I can jam everything into a single post, you can decide to read, or just scroll on past, never clicking on the ‘Read More’ link to expand the post. done! But with the 500 char count, you are forced to A. scroll past all my blathering, or B. try to navigate the confusing-AF threading UI that most masto clients seem to have. How. is. this. better?!

For others, you might say, “jeez, if you have so much to say, why not just make it a blog post”. You’re not wrong. That’s probably a good idea… but! There’s something you get by just organically, and informally typing something into this box that it hard to replicate when you are writing up a formal blog post/note. At least for me where I have to A. be at my computer, B. fill out the proper SSG front matter, C. worry about headings, markdown, etc… And sometimes, it’s not a blog post. It’s just an off-the-cuff, albeit somewhat long, response to something

Also, I can’t count the amount of posts/replies I want to publish that are like 600 characters. So this means I have to either somehow truncate what I want to say, or god forbid, have a threaded post where the child post is like 50 characters long 🤦‍♂️. There are a lot of cringey things on social media, but one thing I really despise is when people have to use the dumb 🧵 or 🪡 emoji before they launch into something. Like.. just have it all in one post! Oh wait, they can’t.

Finally, I’m someone who bookmarks, saves and references a lot of stuff I see on the web, and that includes social media posts, especially on the Fediverse where people tend to share a lot of great stuff! Having an excellent analysis of something forcibly chunked into 500 characters is pretty obnoxious when you want to bookmark something to check out later.

So yeah, I’m going to continue to write lonnnnnng posts, and you’ll all thank me for not having to scroll past 10+ atomic posts in your feed just because you were kind enough to follow me here. Hell, this post is nearly 3k words at this point.