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Mastodon and the Fediverse have often been advertised as "microblogging" tools, and the post length is mainly around the same as one would see on Twitter. That

Mastodon and the Fediverse have often been advertised as "microblogging" tools, and the post length is mainly around the same as one would see on Twitter. That is a big difference from old-time message boards, where longform text was welcome and normal. (Even if the Fediverse does support long post lengths, that matters little if the community has not embraced it.)

TheJoYo 6y ago
writefreely has a better UI for reading long form posts and is quite popular among the academic communities on the fediverse. personally I host a gitea server and link to my longer documentation on my federated account. that gives me a bit more freedom to edit the content and easier to reference. matrix servers are also great for hosting federated long form content.
- kitotik 6y ago
  Could you expound on using matrix for long form content? I host a synapse homeserver, and feel like I’m not using it to its full potential.
  - TheJoYo 6y ago
    The recent Bluesky report is hosted on matrix.org I don't host content on a matrix service but I imagine it's similar to Slack in that regard. I could be way off on matrix' utility here as I don't use it for my primary publication.
  - rglullis 6y ago
    AFAIK, there is no implementation beyond some proof-of-concepts, but the idea is that Matrix (via bridges) can receive and send activitypub updates and treat them as messages in a room. So you could follow and respond to people on a room and they would receive updates on their ActivityPub server. It This idea is not new, really. Movim (https://movim.eu https://movim.eu) is running a federated social network on top of XMPP for over a decade already.
- moksha256 6y ago
  > matrix servers are also great for hosting federated long form content. Can you elaborate on that a bit? In my experience, Matrix implementations tend to be Slack/IRC-style chat interfaces. Are you saying you find such interfaces to be good for long-form content, or are there other Matrix implementations that work out well for long-form content?
  - TheJoYo 6y ago
    The recent Bluesky report is hosted on matrix.org I don't host content on a matrix service but I imagine it's similar to Slack in that reguard. I could be way off on matrix' utility here as I don't use it for my primary publication.
joe_the_user 6y ago
The problem with Twitter/"microblogging" isn't just post length. The problem with Twitter/"microblogging" is also lack of hierarchical structure. A BBS has a series of subboards, those subboard have posts and the posts have comments. Sure, things can degenerate to just a series of "mega-threads" but if it's done, everyone the topic and the subtopic and so you can good contextual discussion. Facebook has a three level structure; post, comment and reply. Some of the oldest boards had full tree-structure as does HN, here. Multilevel comment and reply can be confusing but can be really useful to drill down to the detail of discussion wants.
- amyjess 6y ago
  And I guess this is where I go into full old lady "get off my lawn" mode and mention that I still remember when forums used WWWBoard and its clones (anyone remember CyBoard or VIPBoard?) that provided full comment threading. Any comment can be directly replied to and have its own tree of comments. Like... well, like HN, or Reddit. I really thought forums lost something when UBB and its clones (vBulletin, phpBB, etc.) became dominant, because those systems only let top-level posts have replies. So you just had forum -> subforums -> posts -> non-threaded stream of comments under each post. It was honestly awful, and for much of the 00s forums just became a chore to read and participate in. And it really seemed to bring the worst out of people and of moderation policies: like, back in the WWWBoard days, if you wanted to respond to multiple comments on a thread, you'd reply individually to those comments, and they'd be threaded in the proper position. But on a UBB forum, if you replied individually to comments like that, half the forum would scream their eyes out at you for "double posting" and often the moderators would threaten to ban you if you did it again. And it also meant that any time an argument would start in a post's comments, that argument would take over any and all discussion under that post. In a WWWBoard system, the argument would be segregated into its own subthread and normal discussion can happen in other replies, but UBB didn't allow that. And when you have megathreads, a lot of times they just devolve into everyone just saying their piece and nobody having any real back-and-forth discussion (and honestly "megathreads" are something that didn't exist at all until UBB came around, because WWWBoard and its clones had no concept of bumping or sticky threads: every post was displayed in descending chronological order with no way to reorder anything) Honestly, I jumped for joy when Reddit took over as the de facto Internet-wide forums system, because it finally meant we got to have real threads again.

TheJoYo 6y ago

writefreely has a better UI for reading long form posts and is quite popular among the academic communities on the fediverse. personally I host a gitea server and link to my longer documentation on my federated account. that gives me a bit more freedom to edit the content and easier to reference. matrix servers are also great for hosting federated long form content.

kitotik 6y ago
Could you expound on using matrix for long form content? I host a synapse homeserver, and feel like I’m not using it to its full potential.
- TheJoYo 6y ago
  The recent Bluesky report is hosted on matrix.org I don't host content on a matrix service but I imagine it's similar to Slack in that regard. I could be way off on matrix' utility here as I don't use it for my primary publication.
- rglullis 6y ago
  AFAIK, there is no implementation beyond some proof-of-concepts, but the idea is that Matrix (via bridges) can receive and send activitypub updates and treat them as messages in a room. So you could follow and respond to people on a room and they would receive updates on their ActivityPub server. It This idea is not new, really. Movim (https://movim.eu https://movim.eu) is running a federated social network on top of XMPP for over a decade already.
moksha256 6y ago
> matrix servers are also great for hosting federated long form content. Can you elaborate on that a bit? In my experience, Matrix implementations tend to be Slack/IRC-style chat interfaces. Are you saying you find such interfaces to be good for long-form content, or are there other Matrix implementations that work out well for long-form content?
- TheJoYo 6y ago
  The recent Bluesky report is hosted on matrix.org I don't host content on a matrix service but I imagine it's similar to Slack in that reguard. I could be way off on matrix' utility here as I don't use it for my primary publication.

joe_the_user 6y ago

The problem with Twitter/"microblogging" isn't just post length. The problem with Twitter/"microblogging" is also lack of hierarchical structure. A BBS has a series of subboards, those subboard have posts and the posts have comments. Sure, things can degenerate to just a series of "mega-threads" but if it's done, everyone the topic and the subtopic and so you can good contextual discussion. Facebook has a three level structure; post, comment and reply. Some of the oldest boards had full tree-structure as does HN, here. Multilevel comment and reply can be confusing but can be really useful to drill down to the detail of discussion wants.

amyjess 6y ago
And I guess this is where I go into full old lady "get off my lawn" mode and mention that I still remember when forums used WWWBoard and its clones (anyone remember CyBoard or VIPBoard?) that provided full comment threading. Any comment can be directly replied to and have its own tree of comments. Like... well, like HN, or Reddit. I really thought forums lost something when UBB and its clones (vBulletin, phpBB, etc.) became dominant, because those systems only let top-level posts have replies. So you just had forum -> subforums -> posts -> non-threaded stream of comments under each post. It was honestly awful, and for much of the 00s forums just became a chore to read and participate in. And it really seemed to bring the worst out of people and of moderation policies: like, back in the WWWBoard days, if you wanted to respond to multiple comments on a thread, you'd reply individually to those comments, and they'd be threaded in the proper position. But on a UBB forum, if you replied individually to comments like that, half the forum would scream their eyes out at you for "double posting" and often the moderators would threaten to ban you if you did it again. And it also meant that any time an argument would start in a post's comments, that argument would take over any and all discussion under that post. In a WWWBoard system, the argument would be segregated into its own subthread and normal discussion can happen in other replies, but UBB didn't allow that. And when you have megathreads, a lot of times they just devolve into everyone just saying their piece and nobody having any real back-and-forth discussion (and honestly "megathreads" are something that didn't exist at all until UBB came around, because WWWBoard and its clones had no concept of bumping or sticky threads: every post was displayed in descending chronological order with no way to reorder anything) Honestly, I jumped for joy when Reddit took over as the de facto Internet-wide forums system, because it finally meant we got to have real threads again.