Adrian CockcroftOne thing I liked about the early days at #twitter was the 140 char limit that made it into a conversation. 280 chars was OK, but as the limits get higher on #Mastodon and other places it's turning into a blogging site. The interactivity of a single thought was low friction, and its more work to decide what to say, and more work to skip over other conversations the longer it gets. (This would have been four tweets).
John Minnihan@adrianco fair
Harri@adrianco I didn’t really see anything of value here, no offense
@Harri2230 I'm trying to plant the idea that more isn't always better, as I see people asking for bigger toot limits. Constraints can be good, even if people bump up against them and complain.
@adrianco That 4 tweet paragraph was still pretty quick to read and so much better UX than 4 individual tweets. The fact that tweet storms became so popular should have been a hint to Twitter that people wanted to post more long form sometimes. It's not that hard to support both IMO.
@jesperfj one longer message has less engagement than several short ones in a stream in my experience...
sabik@adrianco how bout we can each plant our own ideas?
Patrick Chanezon@adrianco +1 for concision
Cary Hall@adrianco also they were large font on a single screen and easier to read.
Benjamin Johns@adrianco IMO, Twitter threads were often great, and yet the "threading" was often awkward or straight up broken ("likes and retweets" atomized, interesting replies buried, etc.)
If I could wave a wand I'd make the client present a coherent ~200 chars and then tap-to-expand.
Paul Rohr@Theoreticalb @adrianco No wand needed. Check out the @tooot mobile client (for Android + iOS), which has supported this tap-to-expand feature for a while.
Luke Kanies@adrianco I definitely agree there’s some optimum, and 500chars seems above it, and 1000 way past it.
I think the need for character golf made my writing a lot better, and without that constraint I can just blurt out whatever with no editing.
Elias Mårtenson@lkanies @adrianco 500 is very often a problem. My instance has a limit of 2500 characters, and I'd say that's much closer to the optimum.
The short message limit of Twitter has been described as the cause of a lot of the problems of the medium. The argument is that it encourages boiling down your points to a soundbite, thus encouraging simple explanations to sometimes complicated problems.
Whether that's true is debatable of course, but it's at least possible.
Aaron W | ☕️
Kristoffer Lawson@adrianco I think we do need some soft client-side limit as the really long posts with thousands of characters eat up the feed quickly. There is an argument for slightly longer than early Twitter just due to device sizes today, but extra long posts should be behind a ‘Read More’ button.
@Setok @adrianco +1 to that. The way I was thinking about it is that, yes, there needs to be a reasonable max limit. But below that limit, there should be multiple presentation options. One of them being "read more". Another could be auto-splitting into multiple toots for easier engagement per what Adrian said. I think it's a kind of confirmation bias when we keep saying how great the 140 limit was for terseness, etc.
seachanged@seachanged @adrianco that depends on the client. The official Mastodon UI hides the content, but not the length. So the post ends up taking a huge amount of feed space anyway.
Which official Mastodon UI?
I use the web UI, loaded right from the mastodon servers I have identities on, and when the content is hidden, the length, as seen by the user, is also hidden.
Are you talking about the memory footprint behind the UI, as in "the content is hidden but it still takes up memory in the implementation"?
Seems like on-the-fly compression for toots over some character length might be an incremental solution to the latter problem.
@seachanged @adrianco no I mean it taking up space visually. The app did that and I do remember the web as well, but I haven’t checked recently. There may be some updates or even a config for that.
I don't think there's anything stopping you from using Mastodon like that.
I used to have a regular expression for a client that filtered out toots that were shorter than 141 characters, to avoid tweets that had been echoed to Mastodon.
Adrian Mace@adrianco The constraint wasn’t even intended to be psychological; it was technical!
Twitter wanted users to be able to tweet from an SMS which has 160char limits.