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> Mastodon is primarily for short-form writing of 500 characters or less. Worth noting that fediverse itself isn't -- my Pleroma server has a 5000 character li

> Mastodon is primarily for short-form writing of 500 characters or less. Worth noting that fediverse itself isn't -- my Pleroma server has a 5000 character limit, other servers I've seen have more. There's no reason why they couldn't have every medium post available in fediverse other than profit motivation... look at writefreely as an example for a blog platform that incorporates fediverse, or, uhhh, Wordpress. Well, it's still better that they're wading in the waters than not wading at all, even if they're not willing to dive in :-)

jeroenhd 4y ago
There's a good reason why not every medium post is available on the Fediverse: some articles are paid, or Medium wants you to pay for a subscription to continue reading. If Medium publishes everything to the Fediverse, nobody will pay for Medium anymore. Free articles (marked as such by the authors) should still be postable, though. That said, I don't know if the average Mastodon user or app expects blog posts with 10k words and embedded media. I would expect such rich content, but the "using Mastodon as a Twitter alternative" may not. In the end, it's up to Medium to guess what their user base expects from them.
- input_sh 4y ago
  Display the first few lines and click-to-expand. I believe Mastodon already does this in web interface.
  - donatj 4y ago
    Huzzah, we've invented RSS with more steps.
    - rakoo 4y ago
      RSS with replies and comments, that's a pretty big step up (and I'm all for using RSS when nothing more is needed)
      - ilyt 4y ago
        RSS where the owner of the server can decide to censor articles out of other server cos he doesn't like them seems like huge step-back.
        411111111111111 4y ago
        That's not really an argument. With RSS the person that provided your reader was able to do the same. And you're still able to run your own instance, just like you've been able to run your own RSS reader.
        ilyt 4y ago
        > And you're still able to run your own instance, just like you've been able to run your own RSS reader. Not comparable, and honestly I find it dishonest that you even try. RSS can be just a client on your machine, no need for server running in the cloud. That's far less effort involved. Also I wouldn't be surprised if some instances start to close down traffic from "random one man instances" at some point.
        gary_0 4y ago
        A server owner that filters spam/abuse for you is a great feature, actually -- as long as there are other servers you can feasibly switch to if you don't agree with their definition of "spam".
        ilyt 4y ago
        It's not. Moderated public feeds are useful (way too easy for stuff to get offtopic, even if it is not technically spam or abusive), that I agree on, but if I subscribed to someone I should be able to get their posts, regardless of what random moderator thinks about them. Especially that moderation and "for free" usually ends up with power trips being actual payment to the mods > as long as there are other servers you can feasibly switch to if you don't agree with their definition of "spam". Not that simple. If server A doesn't like X (not even abuse, might just not like topics that are talked about there), server B doesn't like Y and server C doesn't like Z your only choice is your own instance and that's far more effort than most want to go thru
    - dpkirchner 4y ago
      It sounds more akin to the much-loved Google Reader.
      - 3np 4y ago
        How so?
        dpkirchner 4y ago
        Google Reader went beyond basic RSS by adding social-network-lite features such as friends and sharing lists, and a chat integration, similar (although archaic) to what Mastodon and similar services provide now.
        trynewideas 4y ago
        The Reader secret sauce for me was the friend-of-friend social model. You shared items with friends, they shared items with you, and if your or their friends' friends commented on something shared, you/they could see them too. It made it easy to organically grow a close and active group from people who already had a social connection to you — "hey, that person posts lots of interesting comments and knows someone that I follow, I'll follow them too". (And if you didn't like someone or their friends, you could unfollow or block them.) Maybe it's kind of there in how instances interact, or the post visibility features, or some of the forks like Hometown, but Reader had that right-feeling combo of simplicity, personalization, and built-in network.
        PaulHoule 4y ago
        I am experimenting with a smart RSS reader that gets your opinion on everything it shows you (like Tinder) and applies content-based filtering. The technology to do this existed circa 2000 but I’d never seen anyone give it a serious try. One reason for that I realized is that, for a centralized service, you can get better recommendations based on other people’s preferences. Assuming you have a huge user base, users will perceive a collaborative filtering interface learns better. My current classifier takes 20 or 50 judgements to start to understand that I like news about the NFL but I don’t want to see articles about that other kind of football. The content-based model produces a good relevance score (“do I care about the topic?”) but it has no indication of quality apart from that. (Consider how Google is ranking both on query-document match and a quality score.). One input to my system is computer science papers on arXiv and it shows me more papers on ML than I can possibly read, never mind seriously comprehend the abstract in all cases. The relevance score does a great job of vanquishing theoretical CS papers I can’t stand but I wish I saw the 30 best ML papers and not the 30 most tropey. It is gratifying when it shows me papers about how to build this kind of classifier! After all this I have a lot more respect for collaborative filtering despite how dangerous it is socially.
    - robobro 4y ago
      Most fediverse servers automatically provide RSS feeds for users, and sometimes for hashtags. I don't think Fediverse should necessarily replace RSS, but there's something nice about being able to retweet / like posts in a somewhat agnostic context, just as there is having the option to "follow" feed sources in RSS readers if you want that. There are a number of Twitter feeds I subscribe to in my RSS reader using nitter.
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      RSS is a hassle in so many ways. Ken Sheriff posts a blog post every few weeks. I’d really like to get notified of his blog post the instant he posts and and be the first to post it to HN. To get that kind of immediacy I’d have to poll his blog at an unreasonable rate. His blog is just one of 100-1000 independent blogs that I’d like to follow.
      - AndrewStephens 4y ago
        My custom blog software generates RSS but I only post every month or so. In my logs I see RSS clients hit my site hundreds of times a day - all wasted effort. Mastodon (or rather ActivityPub) fixes this by pushing out updates.
        PaulHoule 4y ago
        This is why I am currently using Superfeedr to ingest RSS feeds.
      - oefrha 4y ago
        > I’d really like to get notified of his blog post the instant he posts and and be the first to post it to HN. Maybe drop this pointless karma farming attitude, and you’ll realize polling every ten minutes is totally fine.
        PaulHoule 4y ago
        Every 10 minutes is still 170 or so times a day, or 1000x the http requests that are strictly necessary to read a weekly blog post. My current system runs on a 24 hour cadence of training models and getting judgements from me so I don’t need faster than 24 hours updating.
      - rakoo 4y ago
        That's what websub is for. It sends new entries to followers. It's a complement to RSS
    - fomine3 4y ago
      reinvent RSS looks very good thing to happen.
skybrian 4y ago
Interesting! I'm a bit frustrated with the default character limit and would like to move to an instance with a longer one, but it's not easy to search for. What other instances do you know of with a longer character limit? Can we see how such posts look on other instances with shorter limits?

jeroenhd 4y ago

There's a good reason why not every medium post is available on the Fediverse: some articles are paid, or Medium wants you to pay for a subscription to continue reading. If Medium publishes everything to the Fediverse, nobody will pay for Medium anymore. Free articles (marked as such by the authors) should still be postable, though. That said, I don't know if the average Mastodon user or app expects blog posts with 10k words and embedded media. I would expect such rich content, but the "using Mastodon as a Twitter alternative" may not. In the end, it's up to Medium to guess what their user base expects from them.

input_sh 4y ago
Display the first few lines and click-to-expand. I believe Mastodon already does this in web interface.
- donatj 4y ago
  Huzzah, we've invented RSS with more steps.
  - rakoo 4y ago
    RSS with replies and comments, that's a pretty big step up (and I'm all for using RSS when nothing more is needed)
    - ilyt 4y ago
      RSS where the owner of the server can decide to censor articles out of other server cos he doesn't like them seems like huge step-back.
      - 411111111111111 4y ago
        That's not really an argument. With RSS the person that provided your reader was able to do the same. And you're still able to run your own instance, just like you've been able to run your own RSS reader.
        ilyt 4y ago
        > And you're still able to run your own instance, just like you've been able to run your own RSS reader. Not comparable, and honestly I find it dishonest that you even try. RSS can be just a client on your machine, no need for server running in the cloud. That's far less effort involved. Also I wouldn't be surprised if some instances start to close down traffic from "random one man instances" at some point.
      - gary_0 4y ago
        A server owner that filters spam/abuse for you is a great feature, actually -- as long as there are other servers you can feasibly switch to if you don't agree with their definition of "spam".
        ilyt 4y ago
        It's not. Moderated public feeds are useful (way too easy for stuff to get offtopic, even if it is not technically spam or abusive), that I agree on, but if I subscribed to someone I should be able to get their posts, regardless of what random moderator thinks about them. Especially that moderation and "for free" usually ends up with power trips being actual payment to the mods > as long as there are other servers you can feasibly switch to if you don't agree with their definition of "spam". Not that simple. If server A doesn't like X (not even abuse, might just not like topics that are talked about there), server B doesn't like Y and server C doesn't like Z your only choice is your own instance and that's far more effort than most want to go thru
  - dpkirchner 4y ago
    It sounds more akin to the much-loved Google Reader.
    - 3np 4y ago
      How so?
      - dpkirchner 4y ago
        Google Reader went beyond basic RSS by adding social-network-lite features such as friends and sharing lists, and a chat integration, similar (although archaic) to what Mastodon and similar services provide now.
        trynewideas 4y ago
        The Reader secret sauce for me was the friend-of-friend social model. You shared items with friends, they shared items with you, and if your or their friends' friends commented on something shared, you/they could see them too. It made it easy to organically grow a close and active group from people who already had a social connection to you — "hey, that person posts lots of interesting comments and knows someone that I follow, I'll follow them too". (And if you didn't like someone or their friends, you could unfollow or block them.) Maybe it's kind of there in how instances interact, or the post visibility features, or some of the forks like Hometown, but Reader had that right-feeling combo of simplicity, personalization, and built-in network.
        PaulHoule 4y ago
        I am experimenting with a smart RSS reader that gets your opinion on everything it shows you (like Tinder) and applies content-based filtering. The technology to do this existed circa 2000 but I’d never seen anyone give it a serious try. One reason for that I realized is that, for a centralized service, you can get better recommendations based on other people’s preferences. Assuming you have a huge user base, users will perceive a collaborative filtering interface learns better. My current classifier takes 20 or 50 judgements to start to understand that I like news about the NFL but I don’t want to see articles about that other kind of football. The content-based model produces a good relevance score (“do I care about the topic?”) but it has no indication of quality apart from that. (Consider how Google is ranking both on query-document match and a quality score.). One input to my system is computer science papers on arXiv and it shows me more papers on ML than I can possibly read, never mind seriously comprehend the abstract in all cases. The relevance score does a great job of vanquishing theoretical CS papers I can’t stand but I wish I saw the 30 best ML papers and not the 30 most tropey. It is gratifying when it shows me papers about how to build this kind of classifier! After all this I have a lot more respect for collaborative filtering despite how dangerous it is socially.
  - robobro 4y ago
    Most fediverse servers automatically provide RSS feeds for users, and sometimes for hashtags. I don't think Fediverse should necessarily replace RSS, but there's something nice about being able to retweet / like posts in a somewhat agnostic context, just as there is having the option to "follow" feed sources in RSS readers if you want that. There are a number of Twitter feeds I subscribe to in my RSS reader using nitter.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    RSS is a hassle in so many ways. Ken Sheriff posts a blog post every few weeks. I’d really like to get notified of his blog post the instant he posts and and be the first to post it to HN. To get that kind of immediacy I’d have to poll his blog at an unreasonable rate. His blog is just one of 100-1000 independent blogs that I’d like to follow.
    - AndrewStephens 4y ago
      My custom blog software generates RSS but I only post every month or so. In my logs I see RSS clients hit my site hundreds of times a day - all wasted effort. Mastodon (or rather ActivityPub) fixes this by pushing out updates.
      - PaulHoule 4y ago
        This is why I am currently using Superfeedr to ingest RSS feeds.
    - oefrha 4y ago
      > I’d really like to get notified of his blog post the instant he posts and and be the first to post it to HN. Maybe drop this pointless karma farming attitude, and you’ll realize polling every ten minutes is totally fine.
      - PaulHoule 4y ago
        Every 10 minutes is still 170 or so times a day, or 1000x the http requests that are strictly necessary to read a weekly blog post. My current system runs on a 24 hour cadence of training models and getting judgements from me so I don’t need faster than 24 hours updating.
    - rakoo 4y ago
      That's what websub is for. It sends new entries to followers. It's a complement to RSS
  - fomine3 4y ago
    reinvent RSS looks very good thing to happen.

skybrian 4y ago

Interesting! I'm a bit frustrated with the default character limit and would like to move to an instance with a longer one, but it's not easy to search for. What other instances do you know of with a longer character limit? Can we see how such posts look on other instances with shorter limits?