#longposts — Public Fediverse posts

"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

I'm tempted to add the following preamble to all my posts and comments. This would answer a lot of questions right away and maybe leave nothing unclear.

Preamble

IMPORTANT: I am not on Mastodon. I am on Hubzilla. Hubzilla is not a Mastodon instance. Hubzilla is a wholly different project in the Fediverse. The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. The Fediverse has never been only Mastodon. And Hubzilla is not a fork of Mastodon either.

Mastodon was not even here first. The first was StatusNet from 2008 which later became GNU social. Then came Friendica in 2010. And Hubzilla is from 2015 and based on a project from 2012. Mastodon was launched in 2016. It was immediately federated with all three because it spoke a language that these three spoke, too. Except for GNU social, all are still federated with one another to this day. And this is normal, legal and fully intentional.

We aren't the intruders. Technically speaking, Mastodon is the intruder.

Hubzilla has features that Mastodon doesn't have. Hubzilla has an unlimited character count where Mastodon has a limit of 500 characters. Hubzilla can create various ways of text formatting such as bold type, italics, code blocks, lists or headlines; Mastodon can display them now, but it can't create them. Hubzilla can embed hyperlinks; Mastodon toots only support URLs in plain sight. Hubzilla can do both quotes and "quote-tweets", and it doesn't have to resort to screenshots for either. And Hubzilla always mentions users by their full name, not by their short name like Mastodon.

When Mastodon was launched with its self-imposed restrictions, Hubzilla had had all these features for almost four years already. Friendica had had the same features for almost six years already. And many of these features, including longer posts and text formatting, have been available on all other Fediverse projects since they were created.

Thus, I will use features that are not available on Mastodon even though Mastodon users could read this. I will not refrain from writing over 500 characters in one post, and I will not refrain from using text formatting just because Mastodon users aren't used to that.

We were here first. And we won't limit ourselves just because you're limited by the software you're using. We will continue to make use of features that you don't have. Deal with it.

Unfortunately, the target audience of this, Mastodon users, won't read it because it's too long. Not to mention that it'd require a boatload of content warnings and filter-triggering hashtags; see below.

#Fediverse #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #NotOnlyMastodon #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #500Characters #TextFormatting #Quotes #QuoteTweets #QuoteToots #Long #LongPost #LongPosts #CWLong #CWLongPost #Meta #CWMeta #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #Fedisplaining #CWFedisplaining

I'm halfway expecting #Mastodon users to demand a #ContentWarning for #TextFormatting.

Like, everyone outside of Mastodon must issue a #CW if they use

• bold type
  
• italics
  
• a code block
  
• a bullet-point list

or anything like that because it irritates those who are still used to the #Fediverse only being old-school Mastodon. You know, just like #LongPosts with over #500Characters.

I'm wondering...

What if someone on #Mastodon started a campaign for defederating everything in the #Fediverse that isn't Mastodon?

Reasons:

• users of these projects keep shoving them into the faces of Mastodon users
  
• they think their projects are better than Mastodon
  
• they keep bragging about what their projects can do that Mastodon can't
  
• they spam Mastodon timelines with #LongPosts with over #500Characters
  
• they pester Mastodon users with their #RichText #TextFormatting
  
• they even use text formatting that Mastodon doesn't support, that must be intentional
  
• their mentions look weird because they're different from Mastodon mentions
  
• or they don't mention anyone at all when replying
  
• they can #FullTextSearch Mastodon already now
  
• they can make #QuoteToots of Mastodon toots, and nothing can stop them
  
• they rarely add alt-text
  
• they don't add content warnings because they don't have instance rules that demand so
  
• or they don't add content warnings because they claim that they'd allegedly got a better way of handling them, and the content warning field was actually for something else
  
• they never mark their images sensitive
  
• not a single one of their instances has signed the Mastodon Covenant
  
• you can't reach the admins of their instances
  
• or if you can, and you report a user for some of the stuff above, the admin claims the user hadn't done anything wrong
  
• it confuses and disturbs newbies when they find out that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon
  
• it makes the Fediverse too complicated if not everything is Mastodon

If you actually find this a good idea, keep in mind that defederating an entire decentralised project is a game of Whack-a-Mole.