Politics aside, tumblr is impossible to have long-form conversation on. Sure, it has longer posts than say, twitter, but replying to a chain makes makes things

Politics aside, tumblr is impossible to have long-form conversation on. Sure, it has longer posts than say, twitter, but replying to a chain makes makes things almost impossible to read. [0] Furthermore, instead of following content per se, you follow blogs that are likely going to be insular. Tumblr is just as much of an echo-chamber as Twitter is, if not even moreso. This is quite different from reddit or hn where you see a plethora of topics and submissions from different people related to a topic, and which are upvoted/downvoted. Both reddit and hn's UX allow for long replies and discussion, at least until the thread becomes too nested. You can see the difference in any reddit sub that is geared towards text content instead of link submissions, but especially in /r/AskHistorians and similar. Not that reddit and its ilk don't have any issues, but at least its possible to have longer discussion there. Mastodon is a semi-decent alternative to twitter, but 500 characters is still a tad too short. I suspect they'll make this configurable in future updates. Pleroma [1] has a 5,000 character limit by default, which is configurable. However both of these still suffer from subscribing to people, not content aggregates where anyone can post. So for social networks, Mastodon looks promising if you don't care about the popular culture of pathologically blocking other instances. If you aren't on an instance that doesn't block other ones, you can end up being in an echo chamber easily too. For actual discussion though, I don't know what's better than reddit or hn, even with the problems that they do have. Centralization isn't always bad, although reddit is slowly making itself unappealing, especially once they finally kill off the old design. [0]: http://i.imgur.com/PvO3Hcu.jpg http://i.imgur.com/PvO3Hcu.jpg [1]: Pleroma is another decentralized, federated network that interfaces with Mastodon, GNU Social, and other Fediverse networks.