this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2022
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I've been 'inhabiting' mastodon.social since about the beginning. I've often been frustrated by the limitations imposed by 500 characters of text.

It's just not enough to really express a literate view without splitting up a post among several posts.

Clearly, there are ways to circumvent the limitation, which illuminates it as a futile attempt to control the expression of others.

I know that was never the intention of Mastodon developers. I will reserve judgement as concerns Twitter.

Anyway, since the beginning of the 'great exodus' of mastodon.social users to their own community instances, I've been trying to sort out where I 'belong'.

Well, actually it just might be here :)

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[–] lionel@lemmy.coupou.fr 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Well, welcome. I find it hard to replace mastodon with lemmy though as I think they're not really comparable, except the activitypub part. On mastodon for example based on your message I would have followed you, that's not possible here.

But if it suits you, it's all that mattersπŸ˜ƒ

[–] sparseMatrix@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Sounds like a pretty good feature request XD by no means do I want to see lemmy be an exact copy of reddit, but you can follow people over there, and it seems a usefull thing to do.

My problem with masto is that it's a pretty decent twitter replacement that I found while looking for a facebook replacement. I figured out two things real quick: I really didn't want use anything similar to facebook after all, and while masto came a bit closer to what I'd wanted, in the five or six years I've used it since, I've become a master of cooking my thoughts down to 500 characters.

I don't feel like it was a productive challenge; more often than not I came away feeling semi-muted.

I'll call it the twitter limitation, because I know masto kind of inherited it.

I just found it limiting. Go figure :)

THAT SAID, the masto devs make really good software, without qualification.

[–] wiki_me@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago

Apparently it is configurable so either find a instance where the limit is very high or host your own (or pay someone to do it)

[–] sexy_peach@feddit.de 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I really don't think that there's anything wrong with mastodons character limit.

[–] sparseMatrix@lemmy.ml -1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Hmmmm, whatever floats your boat. I find it highly constraining, but I do like to go on. No doubt the result of a couple years of instruction in collegiate level English composition.

Also, it's more a platform limitation (masto tries to go head to head with twitter) than anything,

In any case, the source of my actual butthurt with mastodon today is this thing they're doing with the android beta. Where you have to be subscribed to their patreon to get it. Honestly, I dgaf about getting the android client; I hate my phone and it's because of the handcuffed, bastardized linux it runs. However I am deeply committed to FOSS, having developed, tested and in fact made a living with it for decades. My beef isn't that I think everything is supposed to be free, it's that I think anything advertised as FOSS damn well better be free or they can anticipate hearing from those pf us who take Free and Open damned seriously. There are a million ways they can directly support themselves in developing mastodon without practically taking a segment of their user base hostage for the FOSS code.

That Is Not The Way.

[–] wiki_me@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 years ago

There are a million ways they can directly support themselves in developing mastodon without practically taking a segment of their user base hostage for the FOSS code.

Then i suggest you open an issue on github, you might find out that funding FOSS for a social media platform is not as easy as you think it is (especially if you don't want to sacrifice some income by giving up on good paying jobs).

[–] bluetoucan@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Are you not mistaken here? Does FOSS not mean "free as in free speech, not as in free beer"? I.e. it does not necessarily mean offering the software to you for zero cost, it means that once you have acquired it (whether you paid for it or it was given away) you can do with it what you wish

[–] LemmeHaveFun@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

Nice to meet you, home.