4 ms·

Mastodon really needs a better way to share/publish long form essays (or anything not tweet sized)

by digitalPhonix 9mo ago

quotemstr 9mo ago
What's wrong with making a Substack?
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- mrweasel 9mo ago
  It's the same as long Twitter posts, strung together by endless tweets a few years ago. People have a platform, they use that. If you don't make it a habit to post long articles, why bother with a new platform when the one you have will suffice? Making a substack, or an account on Medium is "yet another thing" and many simply cannot be bothered and I don't blame them.
pixelpoet 9mo ago
I wish humanity would get over this hyper fixation on short form everything, but I fear that ship has sailed.
- keysersoze33 9mo ago
  You had me at hyper but lost me at fixation
  - DemocracyFTW2 9mo ago
    You had—wat tldr
PurpleRamen 9mo ago
It should be rather simple to add an (optional?) article-view which roll's up a chain of comments from the same author, and presents it as a flat collected text. Each comment would a single paragraph, showing if there are comments from others, to this specific paragraph, which could be shown as an overlay, inline or on the side. No functionality would be lost, but it would improve readability significant. I don't understand why twitter and similar services, never made an attempt to improve their chaotic system. I mean on Twitter there are even bots doing this on external websites.
- kalleboo 9mo ago
  Once it started becoming common to start attaching screenshots of text to Tweets (many years ago now), I wondered why they didn't think to allow add "text attachments" similar to how images and videos are attachments. You put a description of the post within the normal text limitations, and tap a thumbnail to load a long (maybe even markdown-formatted) text and read it. It keeps the feeds short both visually and in bytes.
seba_dos1 9mo ago
It has, the post length limit is an artificial limit imposed by specific instance's configuration and can just be lifted.
yaemiko 9mo ago
or at least better compatibility with reader view... it would just make sense. i was about to suggest it when it worked with brave's one (xtwitter articles and bluesky threads didn't), but then it didn't work in safari

Mastodon really needs a better way to share/publish long form essays (or anything not tweet sized)

quotemstr 9mo ago

What's wrong with making a Substack?

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
mrweasel 9mo ago
It's the same as long Twitter posts, strung together by endless tweets a few years ago. People have a platform, they use that. If you don't make it a habit to post long articles, why bother with a new platform when the one you have will suffice? Making a substack, or an account on Medium is "yet another thing" and many simply cannot be bothered and I don't blame them.

pixelpoet 9mo ago

I wish humanity would get over this hyper fixation on short form everything, but I fear that ship has sailed.

keysersoze33 9mo ago
You had me at hyper but lost me at fixation
- DemocracyFTW2 9mo ago
  You had—wat tldr

PurpleRamen 9mo ago

It should be rather simple to add an (optional?) article-view which roll's up a chain of comments from the same author, and presents it as a flat collected text. Each comment would a single paragraph, showing if there are comments from others, to this specific paragraph, which could be shown as an overlay, inline or on the side. No functionality would be lost, but it would improve readability significant. I don't understand why twitter and similar services, never made an attempt to improve their chaotic system. I mean on Twitter there are even bots doing this on external websites.

kalleboo 9mo ago
Once it started becoming common to start attaching screenshots of text to Tweets (many years ago now), I wondered why they didn't think to allow add "text attachments" similar to how images and videos are attachments. You put a description of the post within the normal text limitations, and tap a thumbnail to load a long (maybe even markdown-formatted) text and read it. It keeps the feeds short both visually and in bytes.

seba_dos1 9mo ago

It has, the post length limit is an artificial limit imposed by specific instance's configuration and can just be lifted.

yaemiko 9mo ago

or at least better compatibility with reader view... it would just make sense. i was about to suggest it when it worked with brave's one (xtwitter articles and bluesky threads didn't), but then it didn't work in safari