Harmony SeekerWondering if Mastodon is really the right space for me. Even with 10,000 characters, my last post still felt cramped. I have so much to say, and trying to pour that into any fixed container is a challenge. Perhaps Substack suits my long-form tendencies better. Is lengthy content considered poor etiquette here? Genuinely curious what others think.
Rosalyn Anne@HarmonthSeeker You can always write on Substack and link to your posts here.
@Rosalyn That's not a bad idea actually.
Jeffrey D. Stark@HarmonthSeeker lol; that's a lot of text... hehe
@JStark Yes I know
Kevin LaRose,aka Grumpasaurus@HarmonthSeeker I would love a 10000 character limit. The limit on my instance is 1500, and that usually does suit my purposes. If you write more long-form stuff, maybe a place like Substack might be a better fit, though I myself have no problem with longer posts. However, I know that many people can get kind of prickly about it. I remember when Twitter went from 140 characters to 280 and many, many tops were blown.
@Thumper1964 That's what I'm woried about.
ahimsa@HarmonthSeeker
I've heard a lot of bad things about substack (supports Nazis). Maybe try buttondown, ghost, or beehiiv for long form blogging?
I don't have accounts with any of them, just passing on some info in case it helps.
@ahimsa_pdx Thank you for the info.
Jenica Lake เหล็ถเลถ@HarmonthSeeker ghost is better than substack for long form. But I do have to say that I’m glad you’re here on mastodon because I wouldn’t have found you on ghost. perhaps continuing your thoughts on the same post, but breaking them into smaller posts may help engagement, and may assist in not feeling cramped to get everything into one post. The feelings you described in your previous post struck near to my heart too and I would love to read more about what you’re thinking/feeling/perceiving/experiencing.
Robert Kingett@HarmonthSeeker No not frowned upon but I always save the long stuff for my website. Https://sightlessscribbles.com/about/
Grow Fediverse@HarmonthSeeker I like using Friendica based instances. Most offer like 200k or more
@growfediverse Thank you for this. I have never heard of this. My next question is if I went with this, how do others view my posts if they don't have those limits?
@HarmonthSeeker Usually they see an exerpt that they can click through to see the whole thing.
Although I think some instances it works like they restrict what size their users post yet their users can still see other instances long posts as one big post in their feeds.
And also if you want to have more control over what people see in the exerpt you can use the "abstract" function to write a little summary instead of it just showing the first so many words of what you wrote and then when the person clicks through they see the whole thing.
hope this helps! it is also sometimes possible to import all the posts from your previous mastodon handle but not always (depends on how well the admin configured the instance), but ive had success importing followers.
Only caveat is Friendica has more features so it may take a moment to get used to its UI being different. But people are usually friendly about helping answer questions. Happy to follow back and help if you end up putting your toe in the water there.
@growfediverse Apart from the long posts, are there other benefits to this service? I will also need it to work with the Mona app, which I'm not sure it will.
@HarmonthSeeker Benefits besides large posts:
- ability to add and organize RSS feeds as though they were contacts and more easily read and share them without leaving your timeline
- more advanced contact management (sort followers or contacts into categories and set varying permissions on how they can interact with your content or how their content appears)
- ability to see which other Fediverse tech a given post is sent from (as I understand it Mastodon just displays all posts as though they came from Mastodon) and integrated plugins for viewing and posting to other stuff like Bluesky and a few other non ActivityPub networks.
- Has groups functionality
- Ability to set up very custom timelines that filter on keywords, hashtags, exclusion lists, etc and in combination (e.g. you want a feed that finds all posts from instances your instance has discovered that discuss gardening or the hashtag foraging, but never if the post includes mention of tomatoes or is posted by your coworkers)
- Supports rich text formats like bold, italics, etc
- minor feature but one I enjoy is custom display style themes.
- A feature that I haven't tried yet is profiles that can be designated to be run by multiple people (probably more of interest to someone who runs a brand)
- Seems to support image galleries well. All the Pixelfed stuff comes through really well too.
- Seems "fedi omnivorous", most all novel Fediverse functions from speciality platforms either work or at least display (Bookwyrm, Peertube, Loops, Pixelfed, Piefed, etc). My understanding is that some things from other fedi platforms dont display at all in Mastodon. Friendica seems to be supporting all possible ActivityPub features and tries to make sure content comes through. Example: The one thing Mastodon has that Friendica doesnt that I know of is voting on polls. The polls text and its results counts post here but you cant vote in or create them from Friendica, just view them.
- Can be run as a progressive web app on mobile, though also supported by some of the ActivityPub apps as well like Racoon, Tusky, and Fedilab. I'm not sure about Mona though and I'm doubtful as glancing at Mona's feature set it seems focused on Mastodon.
There may be other things that I don't realize because I didn't start off with Mastodon and there may be things Friendica does that I take for granted. My experience so far is people asking Mastodon devs to implement features Friendica already had for years. (Like I was so confused when there was that big discussion about quote posts because Friendica already had it for years and was basic functionality, so every time I had been quote posting I'm not sure what that had looked like to Mastodon people before).
Hope this info helps!
Post script: Forgot one ... custom profiles, you can set your profile up so that strangers see one version, your friends see another, your coworkers see another, your church sees another, your chess club sees another. Hide or show whatever aspects of yourself to whomever you designate.
PPS: Forgot another, optional pagination if you hate infinite scroll. That really cut down on how many hours I get sucked in when I didnt want to so I love that option.