Character limits are a feature, not a bug. I liked the limit of 160 characters (with tags) on Twitter. It's because of SMS, but called for brevity and clarity.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 4 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

Except it's meaningless because if people want to put more than that they just create a "thread" of posts that I then break my brain trying to reassemble. They do nothing but make the experience worse.

It also creates turmoil because people aren't actually able to explain themselves properly.

Also why does it tag everyone involved in the conversation automatically in every post? Why is that necessary?

It's just stupid on a fundamental level, sorry.

[–] Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 4 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Threads in microblogs baffle me too. Doubly if replies occur mid-thread. Tagging should be limited to the person being replied to and the OP, not everyone.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

There's no automatic tagging necessary at all. Like you just replied to me, without a tag, and I got a notification in my inbox. There's no need to tag OP or anyone else in this thread unless your reply pertains to them, in which case you can tag them manually.

Now my inbox isn't filled with a bunch of irrelevant nonsense to sift through and the comments aren't filled with a dozen pointless tags.

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 5 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

Isn't character limits an instance setting?

[–] Jayjader@jlai.lu 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

It is, but maybe they mean they want no limit whatsoever on post length.

which, well, if your instance starts sending out megabyte-sized text posts I don't expect it to stay federated with many others for very long.

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 points 10 hours ago

I mean, just set the limit to a ridiculously high number then? I'm not aware that Lemmy has any in-built limits, but I could be wrong.

I believe that Mastodon instances with limits only link to external posts that exceed the limit, they don't display the whole post.

Of course you can always run into network limits if you get huge posts, but that applies to everything and doesn't have anything in particular to do with Mastodon.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

You can modify the code but there's no "setting" in vanilla Mastodon. The request has been denied by Mr. Rochko himself.