Alls,
there have been ongoing discussions then and now about whether (or not) to post full-length posts to ActivityPub platforms that either aren’t Mastodon (Friendica, Firefish, Calckey, … don’t impose that limit of posts to be at max 500 chars), but as far as I noticed, micro.blogs very own AP implementation also just exposes 500 chars and a link back to the full blog article. I see the issues of fixing this for a crossposting scenario, but why does this limit have to apply to micro.blog itself?
@manton ? Anyone else?
Thanks and best regards,
Kristian
If we changed the limit, it would likely apply not just to Friendica, Firefish, etc. but to all platforms. It’s not clear to me how Mastodon (and Mastodon clients) handle long posts. Mastodon is still the most popular platform, so I’d want to make sure it looks good there.
With all the numerous issues ActivityPub has, at least this seems to work reasonably well. Feel free to have a look at in example my Friendica profile - z428@loma.ml - from a random Mastodon instance. Most clients do have ways to handle long posts in a smart way it seems, but even Mastodon web (which is fairly bare-bone) works reasonably well here…
For what it’s worth, I’m on mastodon.social and I’ve never seen a problem with a long post. And yes I know that other instances may have problems — but that’s a hypothetical, and the problems with micro.blog’s ActivityPub support are real. (More on that momentarily.)
I’ve heard that posting long posts that include images via ActivityPub can lead to problems if the images are embedded in a particular spot in the post.
Despite that last, I am firmly on team “please just publish the whole post via ActivityPub—don’t truncate it.”
As of now, the ActivityPub experience is inferior to cross-posting to Mastodon, so I ask that at least bring micro.blog’s ActivityPub support to the same level as Masto cross-posting. As of now, ActivityPub posts are shorter than Mastodon cross-posts, and formatted more poorly.
Yeah, agree here. Don’t want to be demanding about this too, but I learnt, talking to both Fediverse and Mastodon peers, that a lot of people are a bit confused or ignoring micro.blog accounts because of that link to an “external site” rather than having the full post at hand which they know is technically quite feasible.
(I however like this “truncate+link” feature but it would be great to have it as an option. In example, for Threads or Bluesky - platforms which I crosspost to while generally not wanting to be around that much - I would definitely choose this option to maybe lure some users away, no matter how small a chance this is.)
So for the ActivityPub posts considered inferior to the Mastodon cross-posts, I assume this is because the first is 300 characters (or 600 for quotes) but cross-posts are always 500 characters? There are of course other differences such as embedding images and links which I think make ActivityPub posts better, but I hear the feedback.
I think the first change we should make is expanding ActivityPub support to 500 characters (or 600 for quotes, to be consistent with the Micro.blog timeline). Hopefully that gets us halfway there. There are other issues we can’t control that I think will be improved in Mastodon and other platforms over time. For example, the new Social Web Foundation has long-form articles on their roadmap. (As I understand it, Mastodon has no “article” support for long-form posts with inline HTML and images, etc.)
@manton I would appreciate expanding the post length on ActivityPub to 500 characters. A step in the right direction.
I respect that lack of ActivityPub support for inline HTML and images is an obstacle to fully integrating MB and ActivityPub in the manner being discussed here.
Lately I use the manual cross-posting tools as much as I use automatic cross-posting. Make the text I cross-post a little neater before sending it off. On Mastodon, I post the entire post as a thread. Bluesky doesn’t seem to encourage threads, so I just do an excerpt-and-link for longer posts. And I’m taking a break from posting to Threads so that’s not an issue. (I’m already deep enough into the Meta-verse — I don’t want to become invested in another Zuckerplatform.)
I did a five-minute Google search. Not 100% sure but it appears that Write.as/Writefreely handles long posts more-or-less the same way that micro.blog does. Wordpress gives you the option of including the whole text but you don’t get embedded images or HTML. Ghost says they will make the ActivityPub experience the same as the newsletter experience, which presumably means the whole post. But they haven’t implemented it.
I’ve been thinking about this occasionally for the two years I’ve been active on Micro.blog, and the days since this current conversation started. And I have completely changed my mind:
Until there’s a Fediverse standard for long posts, Micro.blog should continue to truncate untitled posts that are more than 500 characters.
Indeed, I’ll go a step further and say that if an untitled post is longer than 500 characters, then it should be truncated at 300 characters. Because 300 characters is long enough for an excerpt.
Thanks for your patience on this question, @manton, and for everything you do on Micro.blog.
Interesting. Because, browsing my timeline from either Mastodon or Friendica, I see a vast bunch of posts especially coming from Friendica (which my homebase is, Fediverse-wise) or Hubzilla that are of course longer than 300 or even 500 chars. And so far, this doesn’t seem to be a problem to people - unlike (to be fair) a lot of folks on these platforms repeatedly are complaining about mainly Mastodon users who throw out posts that either are somewhat truncated or (even worse) come in 1/x threads as people used to do on Twitter, rightfully claiming that in the end it’s a Mastodon-only decision to focus on these “short snippets” whereas “everyone else” (which is probably true in terms of multitude of different platforms but surely not in terms of user count) is easily able to handle longer and even formatted posts (like markdown in Miss/Calckey/Firefish or the HTML/bbcode stuff in Friendica or Hubzilla).
In the end, I … am pretty much impassionate about that. From where I come, that limit in micro.blog to 300 or 500 characters without being explicitely triggered by a user decision doesn’t seem needed and maybe also make things more complex in this regards (as some part of the software has to do so, rather than “just” sending out the post as it is without second thought). But my opinion probably doesn’t matter that much here and, safe to say, Mastodon is the bigger platform in the Fediverse in terms of sheer user count.
Thanks for the discussion. Your opinion definitely matters. We may also want to wait and see what Ghost does when they ship. Ghost is so popular that whatever they decide could drive consistency in Mastodon (and Micro.blog).
