#charactercount — Public Fediverse posts

When you've just written a post or a comment.

When you discover it's over 500 characters.

When you start pondering how you could shorten it to appease Mastodon users.

And when you decide that it's much easier to add the #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost filter-triggering hashtags and, if it's a post, a Mastodon-style long-post content warning in the summary.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #CharacterCount #500Characters

@Panos Damelos (Catodon) :catodon: What's even worse is that just about everyone who joined the Fediverse in the last two years did so with the belief that the Fediverse is Mastodon, i.e. the Fediverse is nothing more than micro-blogging with a maximum of 500 characters.

Many more still believe so than you may think. And I'm not talking about total newbies, but even about second-wave Twitter refugees who came here right after Musk had bought the birdsite.

For others, the first encounter with an over-500-character post was not only completely unexpected, catching them entirely off-guard, but utterly shocking and disturbing.

Now they want their nice, friendly, cosy, fluffy, comfy Fediverse back that's only vanilla Mastodon.

A few actually want a total, absolute, Fediverse-wide ban on posts over 500 characters. Others are looking for technical means that block any and all posts with over 500 characters server-side, and I think they aren't limited to those still stuck on the official phone app that doesn't fold longer posts in because it was built not only against only Mastodon, but against Mastodon being the only Fediverse project.

As long as they don't get that, they complain and mute or out-right block anyone from whom they spot a post with over 500 characters in their federated timeline. And I guess they're so numerous after all that this behaviour cuts deep into the range of everyone who isn't on vanilla Mastodon.

This exactly is why I always add the hashtags #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong and #CWLongPost to everything that goes out of here that exceeds 500 characters. Raw count in a text editor, not fancy Mastodon way of counting. And if it's a post as opposed to a comment, I also add a Mastodon-style CW like "CW: long (5,204 characters)" although Hubzilla a) doesn't have Mastodon-style CWs in the summary field as part of its culture and b) has something much better instead.

Still, hardly anyone reads these posts.

It really seems like the only way to get my posts significant exposure on Mastodon is by actually staying below 500. Considering the amount of hashtags I need for my posts to both be discoverable and trigger filters, and considering that I didn't come from 140/280 characters to 500 characters, but I'm used to not having a character limit, it's a struggle. I often end up giving up, exceeding 500 characters and pulling all long post warning stops because that's easier for me.

It doesn't help that everyone who joins Mastodon believes that Eugen Rochko has invented the Fediverse. Bonus points for Rochko having invented both Mastodon and the Fediverse in 2022 as a reaction upon Musk's announcement to buy out Twitter. If they haven't heard of it any earlier, it probably hasn't existed any earlier.

When they're wondering what kind of witchcraft you're pulling off with your impossibly long post, not to mention stuff like bold type or italics or a bullet-point list, and you've managed to get into their heads that you are, in fact, not on Mastodon, they still think that whatever you're on was bolted onto Mastodon by someone.

Even if you manage to convince them that, no, what you're using is being developed entirely independently from Mastodon, they still think it was made after Mastodon. And they wonder why it deviates so much from Mastodon instead of mimicking it. Or why it exists at all if there's already Mastodon.

However, this also means that they see everything in the Fediverse that isn't Mastodon as an intruder in Mastodon's Fediverse because, of course, Mastodon was here first. And everything that isn't Mastodon has to conform to Mastodon's unwritten rules and adopt Mastodon's culture. In fact, if something isn't Mastodon, it isn't allowed to have its own culture if that culture differs from Mastodon's.

This also means that nothing that isn't Mastodon is allowed to make use of any features that Mastodon itself doesn't have because they disturb some Mastodonians.

Of course, at this point, you could and actually should tell them the truth.

Rochko did, in fact, not invent the Fediverse. Because when Mastodon was launched, the Fediverse had already existed for about eight years. Without Rochko's doing.

When Mastodon was launched, it immediately connected itself to StatusNet, Friendica, Hubzilla and Pleroma. The last three of these are actually still around, still part of the Fediverse, and Mastodon is still connected to them.

So, you should ask them, why do you think Friendica would accept to throw six years more worth of culture than Mastodon has and 80% of its features out of the window and start behaving like a Mastodon clone?

If they don't block you on the spot for not unconditionally surrendering to the new Mastodon overlords, you could try to compare the pre-Mastodon Fediverse projects to Native Americans and Mastodon to white European colonists.

Oh, and by the way: Before Mastodon, character limits in general were an exception rather than the standard, especially if Diaspora* is taken into account.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #NotOnlyMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #FediverseIsNotMastodon #CharacterCount #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #500Characters

@morph But not everyone uses Fedilab.

Especially newbies who think the Fediverse is only the nice and cosy and fluffy Mastodon they've just discovered are often on the official app. The offical app doesn't fold long posts in. If I post 77,000 characters, and I have posted 77,000 characters in the past, users of this app get all 77,000 characters onto their screens with no way to fold them in.

I'm not sure, but I think TootSuite doesn't roll long posts in either.

The Web UI folds posts over 2,000 characters in to a length of ca. 1,500 characters. That's still way over the 500 characters that your typical Twitter-to-Mastodon refugee expects to be the Fediverse-wide upper limit.

As for literally nobody being disturbed about posts over 500 characters, here are a few quote-posts of actual Mastodon posts. These aren't the only two people upset about over-500-character posts; there are plenty more, but they're hard to find with hashtag searches.

Citizen.Coping wrote the following post Wed, 20 Mar 2024 23:24:21 +0100 @Gargron

Being able to mute or filter posts that exceed 500 characters would be great.

Search is not good because it returns too many dissertations.

benjaminbuse wrote the following post Tue, 29 Aug 2023 09:33:49 +0200 Always disappointed when people exceed #500Characters reminds of when #twitter brought out paid subscription with longer #CharacterLimit

500 characters is lengthy micro blogging, longer is not

The freedom of different instances (servers) but I won’t favourite or boost anything exceeding 500

#LessIsMore
#ThreadsArePossible

Or look at this poll on CWs for long posts which I ran two months ago. Of 19 participants, 4 (21%) want CWs for posts over 500 characters, and 1 (5%) wants them banned Fediverse-wide entirely.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterCount #500Characters

@phanisvara (streams) Yes, but many Mastodon users can't stand to see posts with over 500 characters. Not only do they refuse to read "long" posts, but some actually block anyone who exceeds 500 characters in a post even only once.

I'm pretty sure some ask their Mastodon instance admins to deal with such people. Have them blocked instance-wide. Have their whole Hubzilla hub blocked on that Mastodon instance.

Or they try to use Mastodon's report feature to report that Hubzilla user to the admin of that Hubzilla hub, or they have their admin try and get into contact with the admin of that Hubzilla hub, just to have that Hubzilla user sanctioned for breaking some unwritten Mastodon etiquette by posting over 500 characters in one chunk.

Of course, they fail in both cases. Hubzilla doesn't support Mastodon's report feature, and mentioning Hubzilla users, in this case the admin, in a public post won't work either. Verdict: That Hubzilla hub is unmoderated and therefore has to be blocked or even out-right Fediblocked.

On the grounds of the assumption that Hubzilla works exactly like Mastodon. Which I'm trying to debunk with this series of posts.

As at least one of my polls has revealed, there seems to be a not insignificant number of Mastodon users who demand posts with over 500 characters be banned absolutely everywhere in the Fediverse. Including in conversation between users on other projects, regardless of whether overly long posts from that conversation might leak into Mastodon or not.

And, of course, there's the Mastodon police that try to urge non-Mastodon users to limit their posts to a maximum of 500 characters, regardless of whether they're aware that the user in question is on something else than Mastodon or not. They're fully convinced that Mastodon was here first, and all the other projects are intruders in Mastodon's Fediverse and have to follow Mastodon's rules.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterCount #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #500Characters #Mastodon

A meme post can be

• accessible by having a sufficiently detailed description of the image and explanation of the meme in the post itself
  
• short enough for Mastodon users to be willing to read it (500 characters or fewer)

Choose one. Only one. You can't have both.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Accessibility #A11y #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #500Characters #CharacterCount

Here are the stats for the post:

The summary and Mastodon-style content warning: 189 characters

The actual post: 889 characters, counted raw (as opposed to the Mastodon way with 23 characters per link and including the summary/content warning)

Alt-text: 920 characters

Image description: 25,420 characters, counted raw again, all headlines included

Hashtags: 147 characters in 13 hashtags, four of which are for triggering content warning filters

The whole post body: 26,312 characters

This is my third-longest image description to date.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #CharacterCount #AltText #ImageDescription

@Angry Tea Lady As far as I can see, there is no general consensus or agreement upon what's the right amount of description for an image. I guess it also really depends on the image. Cat photographs can do with rather short descriptions while other pictures require descriptions so long that you couldn't possibly post them in one piece anywhere on most Mastodon instances. Good thing there's a Fediverse beyond Mastodon.

There are two things I keep in mind for my own image descriptions. One, if something is obscure and niche enough for average Fediverse users to not know anything about it, it needs to be described and explained. That'd better go into the post text itself, but since my image descriptions often grow extremely long, I put them there anyway.

Two, whenever an image description mentions what there is in a picture, blind or visually-impaired people are likely to want to know what it looks like. So any and all descriptions must include that. It's more ableist not to give visual descriptions than to give them and make the image description longer.

I myself tend to try to include whatever I read about that should be part of an image description. Just recently, someone wondered why so few people mention where they've taken a picture. Good thing I've been doing that ever since I've started writing detailied image descriptions.

It's just unfortunate that people rarely give feedback for image descriptions, especially without being asked for it first. My own image descriptions regularly grow so long that they exceed any idea of excessive. What few people have given me feedback so far, including one who has done it out of the blue, liked them, but such a small number of people couldn't possibly represent all of the Fediverse. Then again, I hardly post images anymore because of how long it takes me to describe them, and fewer images mean even less feedback.

But if it looks like I can get away with image descriptions that are way longer than some essays, I think it's hard for alt-text within Mastodon's 1,500-character limit to be too long.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #CharacterCount #Accessibility #A11y

@Stefan Bohacek Let's not limit this to only image descriptions in alt-text in toots from vanilla Mastodon.

How long is too long for an image description in general, regardless of whether it's in the alt-text or the post text? Or specifically when it's part of the post text? Is there such a thing as too long?

I'm asking because while I'm indirectly bound to Mastodon's 1,500-character limit for alt-text because Mastodon cuts everything that's longer permanently off, I'm not bound to Mastodon's 500-character limit for posts because I'm someplace very different from Mastodon. And my image descriptions tend to grow unimaginably long.

They have to be that long in order to be sufficiently informative. My own pictures are always from non-real-world places that nearly nobody knows, and so they only contain stuff that nearly nobody knows. And they don't always focus on one element so that everything else can be swept under the rug. So I have to describe a lot, and I have to explain a lot.

Let's just say I can no longer write full detailed and sufficiently informative image descriptions within Mastodon's constraints, not even within 1,500 characters. Even a carefully chosen camera angle that shows as few surrounding and background details as possible plus cropping away some more details won't let me stay within the 1,500-character limit.

Now, the thing is I hardly get any feedback for my image descriptions. Most of my image posts get none at all. Some sighted users say they're generally too long, but they never criticise any particular description of mine. Instead, they go by the character counts I tell them.

On the other hand, I've just received praise from a blind user for a post (content warning: eye contact) with two pictures and my longest image description to date: The preamble for both images has slightly over 1,300 characters, the description for the first image has almost exactly 40,000 characters, the one for the second image which references and relies on the former has about 6,750 characters.

Mastodon's alt-text police seems not to have discovered my posts yet, probably because none of them follows me. That, or they're perfectly okay with what I write. Without any feedback, I can't know. So I'm asking all of you.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #CharacterCount

The above post (this is a reply in a thread) in numbers:

• Title (invisible for users of Mastodon and several other Fediverse projects): 61 characters
  
• Summary (= content warning on Mastodon): 320 characters, including three content warnings
  
• Main post, not counting markup: 770 characters
  
• Alt-text, first image: 866 characters
  
• Alt-text, second image: 860 characters
  
• Image descriptions, preamble including title line, not counting markup: 1,329 characters
  
• Image description, first image, including title line, not counting markup: 39,932 characters
  
• Image description, second image, including title line, not counting markup: 6,757 characters
  
• Hashtags: 16 hashtags, 8 of them content warnings, 182 characters
  
• Whole post including extra blank lines, but excluding the title, the summary and alt-texts and not counting markup: cs. 48,977 characters

My previous record for image description length (38,650 characters) has been broken.

#CharacterCount #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #CW #CWs