#longpostmeta — Public Fediverse posts

How much of a nuisance have Mastodon users working around Mastodon's hard-coded 500-character limit become, at least from a non-Mastodon point of view?

Enough of a nuisance for the main developer of Hubzilla to speak up against it.

Mario Vavti wrote the following post Wed, 22 Oct 2025 11:47:16 +0200 Dear people of the Fediverse,
Please STOP tearing your carefully crafted essays to pieces. This is no longer necessary. If your preferred instance does not allow this, consider asking your instance admin to increase the limit or switch to a different instance. Besides, it is so last decade :face_with_rolling_eyes:

See? If Mastodon users can complain about "long posts" from outside Mastodon, namely anything that exceeds 500 characters, then those of us who did not come into the Fediverse via Mastodon can complain about Mastodon users chopping long posts up into lots of little pieces.

Little nitpick: It has never been necessary. Friendica and Hubzilla have had a nearly unlimited character count since before Mastodon came with 500 characters.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuoteToot #QuoteBoost #Fediverse #Mastodon #LongPostMeta #CWLongPostMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits

"Write your posts as long as you want," they say.

"Don't be apologetic about it," they say.

"Literally everyone in the whole Fediverse has gotten used to posts over 500 characters, and nobody minds anymore," they say.

"Literally everyone on Mastodon is perfectly okay with all of Hubzilla's antics," they say.

"Nobody wants the Fediverse to only be vanilla Mastodon," they say.

Oh, really? Then I've probably faked this shared post here.

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.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LongPosts #LongToots #LongPostMeta #CWLongPostMeta #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #QuotePost #QuoteBoost #CharacterCount #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #500Characters #Sarcasm

Votes are in for another poll. This time it was about whether or not long posts should have a content warning.

The majority of Mastodon voters (9 of 14) voted against it, but roughly one out of three Mastodon voters voted in favour of it.

Even if I'll definitely ignore the one voter who wants posts over 500 characters banned all over the entire Fediverse, I'm not sure what to make of it myself. I mean, I almost always post over 500 characters.

On the one hand, content warnings for over 500 characters have their place. There seems to be at least one app that was built under the assumption that the Fediverse is only vanilla Mastodon, and there will never be over 500 characters in the Fediverse, so folding posts is unnecessary. Thus, it can't fold posts, and it shows all posts at their full length. Other frontends may offer the option to always unfold all posts, and users who thought that no post will ever exceed 500 character anyway have chosen that option.

I've only got one way to keep my posts from showing up in their timelines as gigantic walls of texts, and that's a summary which appears as a content warning on Mastodon. In fact, I've always added the character count, so people know beforehand if that post has only 700 character or over 75,000, and they can decide whether or not to open it. And yes, I've once posted over 77,000 characters in one post.

On the other hand, I guess that Mastodon users are blocking me left and right for my long posts anyway, regardless of whether or not I issue a content warning. I think there are tens of thousands of Mastodon users who have blocked me meanwhile.

The worst offenders, I think, have to be my rare image posts. Mastodon wants image descriptions. Image descriptions which actually describe what's in the image sufficiently both for the context and for the target audience and which also explain what the target audience doesn't know or understand. Yes, I do that, but for reasons I've already explained in an article, I always have a lot to describe and explain. This, however, means that I regularly put more characters into the description of one image than many prolific alt-text writers on Mastodon put into all their alt-texts of one whole month. And such a description can only go one place. That isn't the alt-text, that's the post.

So if I don't describe my images, my image posts may not be boosted, and Mastodon users may pester me to write alt-texts. But when I do describe my images, the posts aren't boosted either due to being too long and not even interesting, and Mastodon users block me out-right for excessively long posts. A content warning won't change anything.

Besides, I can't put Mastodon-style content warnings on replies anyway. On Hubzilla, replies aren't just posts like any other post. Hubzilla is not a Twitter clone. On Hubzilla, replies are comments like blog comments or Facebook comments or Tumblr comments. They even have their own dedicated entry masks while Mastodon has one for everything. And those entry masks don't have a summary field which is the same as Mastodon's CW field. I mean, who would put a summary on a blog comment?

Lastly, no warnings for my long posts reduces the effort for me. See, Hubzilla doesn't have a character counter, not in the post editor and not in the comment editor either. It doesn't need a character counter. It doesn't have any character limit to worry about.

So whenever I write a post, I generate a preview, then I copy the preview into a text editor, e.g. Mousepad, then I count the characters. And if they're over 500, I write a summary including a "CW: long ([insert rough or exact character count here] characters)" content warning and the four hashtags #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong and #CWLongPost for those who have filters for long posts which either remove them entirely or generate content warnings for them. So my long posts always grow longer by another 36 characters due to these hashtags. But I guess nobody filters either of these hashtags anyway.

I think I don't have to do either if people block me for my long posts anyway. I mean, I'll go on issuing content warnings for what might disturb Mastodon users; see this very post. And I'll go on issuing them two-fold, both as a Mastodon-style CW in the summary field and as filter-triggering hashtags. But maybe long-post warnings are ultimately useless because they don't change anything.

P.S.: Of course, non-Mastodon users don't care either way. My fellows on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) are used to massive walls of texts as regular posts because that has been part of their culture since 2010. They can't see how this could possibly be a problem. People on Misskey and the Forkeys are used to long posts, too, and besides, the *keys apparently reject posts with over 10,000 characters anyway.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterCount #CW #CWs #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #CWMeta #ContentWarningMeta #LongPosts #LongPostMeta