Garry KnightNov 5, 2022

How do you make a thread on Mastodon?

Pretty much the same way as on Twitter, with one difference. You compose the first post, publish it, then reply to it, then reply to it again, and so on. But there's one difference. If the first post is Public, you can make all the others Unlisted. This way, people can follow the thread by clicking on the first post, but their timeline isn't clogged up with all of the other posts.

[A short thread]

#FediTip #help

Show threadGarry KnightNov 5, 2022
If you use the Metatext app, you can create a thread much more easily. Compose the first post and then, before you publish it, tap on the + button at the bottom right of the edit box and it will start a new, threaded post. Note: when you finally publish the entire thread, it might look on your timeline as if some of the posts are out of order. But go to your Profile and you should see them in the right order.
Show threadFabio ManganielloNov 6, 2022
@garry or use instances like mine that don't have strict limits on message so you won't need threads :)
Show threadJos Schuurmans (EN)Nov 6, 2022

Thank you @blacklight. I tend to thread quite a bit, so this could be useful for me.

Any advice on where to find instances with lower restrictions on toot length, and cross-reference them with ethical standards?

Sysop continuity and technical performance would be great to compare as well, but that may be a bit of a long shot.

Show threadJos Schuurmans (EN)

On second thought @blacklight, browsing through some of your longer-than-500-chars, truncated posts, what I miss is an indication of how many truncated parts to expect.

In my own threading I try to indicate the number of posts (1/n etc.) and I find that helpful when browsing. Is there perhaps a way to automate such paging on a Mastodon instance that has more lenient post length limits?

Nov 6, 2022 at 10:41pmWeb
Show threadFabio ManganielloNov 7, 2022

@josschuurmans my instance (social.platypush.tech) supports up to 10k characters, as well as up to 10 profile description entries, and I'm working on markdown toots.

I also know of qoto.org that supports toots up to 65k characters, and it also supports markdown. And instances that run the glitch-soc fork of Mastodon in general support longer posts. In my case I decided to stick to the vanilla codebase and only tweak the parts that I needed though. I feel like glitch-soc has departed too much from the original Mastodon codebase and it'll be tricky to import new upstream features.

About the truncated posts, that's actually quite interesting. AFAIK most of my followers are usually able to see the whole content even if the underlying instance has a shorter maximum toot length. Do you mean that long toots appear truncated on your instance?

Show threadDing Nov 7, 2022
@josschuurmans @blacklight interesting - so if you make a long post, does it take the long text and automagically cut the extra and add it to a reply (which would be clever)? Or does it truncate the overflow and you just lose it?
Show threadFabio ManganielloNov 7, 2022

@Dingfelder ActivityPub doesn't have limits on post length, so the messages are streamed to instances in their full length. AFAIK Mastodon (at least the recent versions) renders the full message, even if the instance has a shorter limit for the messages it can deliver.

The limit is only set on the web application, not on the database, so nothing prevents longer posts from being rendered - and that's indeed the case for my posts rendered on e.g. mastodon.social and mastodon.online.

That's why I'm a bit confused when I hear that some of my posts are cut on some instances :) I'm not sure if older instances or some forks have a different way of handling long messages...

@josschuurmans