Heh. Yes, I don’t want to dictate that replies should be short or some arbitrary limit, but replies of several paras really throw out the Timeline.
It’s more like the Timeline is a viewport into blogs — it’s a quick glance, and if there’s too much to absorb in one glance then it’s time to stop and investigate.
Could it be possible to truncate on the timeline itself? So not turn it into a blog post with a separate link, but just add a button that shows the entire text right there?
I’m the one who started the thread @pratik mentioned above. I find the 300 limit very annoying, so would hate for it to be as harsh to replies as well. 
Like, the reply you showed there must’ve had several thousand characters. Let’s not use that as a reason to enforce 300, please.
I don’t want to stop people replying as they see fit. What I want is to be able to scroll through a timeline that doesn’t show the entirety of such long replies by default. Ditto for posts with lots of photos. My later thought was to enable a disclosure triangle. That or a More Button would meet my wishes just fine.
Yes - and that I completely agree with. 
Sorry if that was unclear!
That would be pretty sweet. I always feel a little guilty about long replies, and it sounds like this would guide folks toward good “put your stuff on your blog” behavior.
Please increase the length of posts visible on ActivityPub from its current limit of 300/600 characters to 1,500 characters.
Mastodon is the primary ActivityPub platform, and some Mastodon instances support much longer than 500 characters. It all works fine.
However, we don’t want to let posts get TOO long. 1,500 seems like a nice compromise.
Alternative (less desirable but still better than what we have now): Please increase the limit to 500 characters. As it stands now, consuming micro.blog through ActivityPub is inferior to consuming Mastodon, and that doesn’t seem right.
Interestingly if your Mastodon instance supports more than 600 characters and you post there first and then crosspost (import as a post) to Micro.blog, it will display the post in full on the Micro.blog timeline
You mean direct the Mastodon RSS feed to micro.blog and have it import to micro.blog and add to the micro.blog timeline?
That’s an interesting idea. I might just try it.
Personally, I would hate this. Long posts are not a good experience on a short post social feed. I hate the inconsistency already that permits people to shove full blog posts in line on Mastodon already, and thank my stars for a show more button in most apps.
My long posts should have links to my blog where they live.
If this were ever increased and not be a setting based on my cross posted mastodon server or my user, I’d just turn it off.
I would hate it too, but just saying, it is possible. I noticed it when someone had a long post in the timeline (thankfully, not a tome) but enough past the char limit to get noticed. I too, think 500 chars is enough. I’m still looking for UI/UX research on the char limit that doesn’t overwhelm the timeline.
@jsonbecker I need to go back to your timeline and see how you handle long posts. You seem like a sensible fellow; maybe I’ll get good ideas.
@pratik I respect the micro.blog timeline. I’m not arguing for changes there. To tell the truth, I don’t use the timeline much, so I would feel like a guest arguing for changes in the host’s house.
I do exactly the default-- my long posts are just titles with links, and I don’t worry about it. I have Tinylytics loaded, and it pretty clearly shows me people still click on links.
I think I’ll try that. I am perpetually frustrated with the amount of cutting-and-pasting I do to get everything just so on the various social networks I’m on.
I am firmly convinced that being precious about that results in endless frustration and little difference. I try and take the attitude that I’m precious about my blog, because I control that and it’s the canonical place for my stuff. Everything else is just me delivering my blog so that it’s as convenient to read as I can make it without inconveniencing me while I write it.
That’s a good attitude.
I just tried the micro.blog way with a post that’s just barely over 500 characters—something I’d normally worked to share in a more native format. It seems to have yielded satisfactory results.
I’d love to see webm added to the supported video file formats!
On my Linux system (GNOME), this is the format screencasts are saved with.
At some point since I posted the message above, webm seems to work now!
Yep! Looks like it was implemented almost immediately after you posted.
Quick reminder for the thread that updates with changes are covered on the News blog and Manton’s blog, both of which are available on the timeline and in feed readers.
For me it might be the kind of posts with hashtags that are being discouraged.
It would be interesting if there were a way to filter out hashtags and emojis for specific cross-posting targets. For example, the Micro.blog timeline doesn’t support hashtags, but posts I crosspost elsewhere can benefit from them. The Micro.blog timeline uses a set of pre-approved emojis in lieu of hashtags, but I have no use for those emojis appearing elsewhere. Finally, some custom feeds on BlueSky grab posts on the basis of an emoji, provided someone is on the list, and no one else really needs to see these emojis.
