this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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Yet they still think it's a good idea to limit text posts to 300 characters for reasons I cannot fathom.
The original reason was so that you could fit an entire tweet into a text message because that's how you are supposed to interact with it when twitter first launched and they doubled it later. Having a character one with that short is it strongly discourages any sort of long-winded explanation or coherent thought. Do you feel like you either have to a bridge what you're saying to fit the sharply artificial character limit or you have to replace yourself over and over which is somehow a thing that's except it is normal this might be crazy. Thankfully Macedon has always allowed you to set a custom limit and most are very large these days. I think 10,000 characters is a decent default. One of the good things about Ray's I always allowed roughly that much text which means that you only ever had to replace yourself if you were well and truly effort posting, or that one time someone posted the entirety of John galt's speech as an epic shit post. This is one way we can beat the corporations and it's as simple as editing a single config file
It isn't. Mastodon has a character limit hardcoded in two places. Critically, that's not a limit on what it can receive and display, just on what local users can post. With Bluesky, it's part of a schema that would be enforced on posts from elsewhere, if anybody was actually running a Bluesky-compatible appview in the wild.
It's a Twitter-like replacement. That model clearly worked for a lot of people, why change the formula?
So what is the character limit you consider acceptable on Bluesky?
10,000 characters seems good. You want something that most people will never feel constrained by because that allows you to make actual posts. People should not have to comment on their own Post 10 times to express a coherent thought
I don't see value in a character limit other than whatever might be needed for technical reasons. Bluesky allows alt text for images to be 2000 characters, so clearly any technical limitations allow at least that much.
For those who prefer short text posts, hiding posts longer than a user-configurable setting behind a "see more" link would do.
Yeah there's no good reason for a limit. Having no character limit doesn't stop people from making short posts if they want. If they don't want long posts taking up half the page, then they should just hide the rest of the text behind a 'see more' prompt once it goes over 300 characters.
On a platform like Bluesky I can kinda understand if they limited replies to posts to 300 characters, so that people don't get walls of text in their inboxes but the original top post should be unlimited IMO.
Bluesky aims to be a Microblogging, although its protocol can be used for other types of social networks. They may increase that limit a bit, but the fact that there is no character limit is more likely to be found in another social network that uses the protocol that Bluesky does.
I think the idea that forced brevity is an important component of microblogging is mistaken. Low friction to post, minimal formatting, and (optionally) collapsed long posts in feeds all encourage short posts without requiring them.
It might have served more of a purpose when Twitter launched because people weren't in the habit of short text posts at the time, and because Twitter supported posting via SMS.
I think the original point was to facilitate a noisy town square feeling. In that setting, you don't have several paragraphs to get your point across, you need to condense your thought to a couple sentences or you'll get lost in the sea of other voices. You bring handouts (links) and something to show (images) and that's it.
Although as a format that kind of sucks. It's not terribly useful for anything more than promoting your blog post or what have you and when you have Nazi seig heiling all over the place it becomes completely unusable
Twitter was incredibly popular, which certainly means something.
This has nothing to do with the format.
There is a chance that I just don't get microblogging. I've always felt that short character limits encourage people to make bad points that resonate emotionally but fall apart when thought through, and to yell at people they disagree with rather than being thoughtful.
That's how I feel too. It's really limits the ability to actually carry on a conversation. The one thing I will say is that a focus on people other than the focus on content gives a different sort of vibe which is situational useful
I agree, which is why i don't use Twitter/X, Bluesky, or Mastodon. I prefer the Lemmy/Reddit style of medium-length, topic-centered discussion.