grok_mctanys

I recently joined a Mastodon instance.

I've been meaning to for a while. I was never on Xitter because it always seemed inane, and some of the people who I follow in other contexts on the internet, who are good long form writers, posted reams of uninteresting micro-guff on Xitter. But maybe Mastodon would be better?

However, within a week of getting an account and following not-that-many people, I came across EMFCamp's toot in my timeline:

https://social.emfcamp.org/@emf/statuses/01HXRZ1PRXCPNPDSFQSCMED9TB

reposting their first blog announcement from 12 years ago. The post is too long for Mastodon's 500 char limit, and presumably just linking to it wasn't "immediate" enough for their needs - they wanted to actually put the post in their followers' timelines. So instead of posting 1KiB of text, they posted a 330KiB image of text, and put the 1KiB blog post in the "alt" attribute of the image!

Also, there's Cory Doctorow's feed of 30+ toot threads most days:

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

I don't mean to pick on EMFCamp and Cory specifically, but they are the examples I ran across. And actually, EMFcamp and Cory are great examples to use as people who aren't going to be acting in bad faith, or trolls, or whatever. They're good people.

Because I've come across these posts so quickly, from such a small sample size of posts I've actually seen, I am concluding that this kind of posting behaviour is not particularly unusual. It would be very unlucky for me to have done so otherwise, right? But, you know, I could be wrong.

So, for anyone who's been on Mastodon a while, does this seem like "perfectly reasonable behaviour" to you? Do you look at this and think "Uh huh. Nothing strange or unusual about that. That's just how things work"?

Does, in fact, the Mastodon hive mind simultaneously think a) an arbitrary, artificial, self-imposed 500 char limit is a good thing; and b) posting massive threads, or images of text with a copy of the text in the alt attr, is not "weird" or "abusing the system" or just "bonkers"?

(I wonder - if someone habitually posted a 20x20 blank image, with what they wanted to say in the alt attr, and the post content being "text in alt" to get around the 500-char limit, would that be best characterised as "a neat hack" or "burn it with fire"?)

Xitter had a short character limit because it was originally SMS-based, which forced a max tweet length of 160 chars. And even when it gave up the SMS limitations, short messages were part of its DNA.

But Mastodon is supposed to be a break from Xitter, right? So, why the 500 character limit? Why "federated microblogging" and not just "federated blogging"? If someone's posts tend to be too lengthy, and you only have a 500-char attention span or hate seeing a couple of paragraphs followed by a "[Read more ...]" expander, just don't follow them! (Exactly like the current advice for if you don't like long threads is "well, just don't follow people who post them")

FWIW, I tried putting this together as a Mastodon thread. But there's no way to draft a thread. Or even save a draft of a single toot. Either you post it, or you don't. And you can't make a post "Mentions Only" (closest thing to "Private") and then change the visibility of all parts to "Public" once the thread is complete, because making posts more private might be an avenue for harassment.

Somewhat ironically, while searching for a way to draft a toot thread in a sane manner, the best result I came across was Cory Doctorow's How To Make The Least-Worst Mastodon Threads where he talks about how bad Mastodon threads are, but why he still likes them, and therefore approves of the 500-char limit. As if he couldn't post threads the way he currently does on a blogging platform that allowed unlimited characters (like on his own blog), if he wanted to?

sigh