Create accountLogin

Recent searches

No recent searches

Search options

Only available when logged in.
toad.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Mastodon server operated by David Troy, a tech pioneer and investigative journalist addressing threats to democracy. Thoughtful participation and discussion welcome.

Administered by:

Server stats:

275
active users

toad.social: AboutProfiles directoryPrivacy policy

Mastodon: AboutGet the appKeyboard shortcutsView source codev4.3.8

#CharacterCount

0 posts0 participants0 posts today
Public
Cliff

What's the post character count limit for your instance on Mastodon?

Meaning, when you make a post here on Mastodon, how many characters per post can you type?

For example, currently #AllThingsTech has the default Mastodon 500 character count limit.

If your instance has more than a 1,000 character count limit, please comment and let me know.

Please BOOST for maximum exposure to the #Fediverse

· 284 people · Closed
#Poll#Polls#POTD
Public
Jupiter Rowland
When you've just written a post or a comment.

When you discover it's over 500 characters.

When you start pondering how you could shorten it to appease Mastodon users.

And when you decide that it's much easier to add the #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost filter-triggering hashtags and, if it's a post, a Mastodon-style long-post content warning in the summary.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #CharacterCount #500Characters
hub.netzgemeinde.euNetzgemeinde/Hubzilla
#500characters
Replied in thread
Public
Jupiter Rowland
@morph But not everyone uses Fedilab.

Especially newbies who think the Fediverse is only the nice and cosy and fluffy Mastodon they've just discovered are often on the official app. The offical app doesn't fold long posts in. If I post 77,000 characters, and I have posted 77,000 characters in the past, users of this app get all 77,000 characters onto their screens with no way to fold them in.

I'm not sure, but I think TootSuite doesn't roll long posts in either.

The Web UI folds posts over 2,000 characters in to a length of ca. 1,500 characters. That's still way over the 500 characters that your typical Twitter-to-Mastodon refugee expects to be the Fediverse-wide upper limit.

As for literally nobody being disturbed about posts over 500 characters, here are a few quote-posts of actual Mastodon posts. These aren't the only two people upset about over-500-character posts; there are plenty more, but they're hard to find with hashtag searches.

Citizen.Coping wrote the following post Wed, 20 Mar 2024 23:24:21 +0100 @Gargron

Being able to mute or filter posts that exceed 500 characters would be great.

Search is not good because it returns too many dissertations.

benjaminbuse wrote the following post Tue, 29 Aug 2023 09:33:49 +0200 Always disappointed when people exceed #500Characters reminds of when #twitter brought out paid subscription with longer #CharacterLimit

500 characters is lengthy micro blogging, longer is not

The freedom of different instances (servers) but I won’t favourite or boost anything exceeding 500

#LessIsMore
#ThreadsArePossible

Or look at this poll on CWs for long posts which I ran two months ago. Of 19 participants, 4 (21%) want CWs for posts over 500 characters, and 1 (5%) wants them banned Fediverse-wide entirely.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterCount #500Characters
MastodonCitizen.Coping (@PropCazhPM@mastodon.social)2.03K Posts, 179 Following, 150 Followers · Thoughts on product mgmt, risk mgmt (communities, biz, health, insurance), tech, analytics & innovation. And frequently art.
Public
Jupiter Rowland
Replied in thread
Public
Jupiter Rowland
@phanisvara (streams) Yes, but many Mastodon users can't stand to see posts with over 500 characters. Not only do they refuse to read "long" posts, but some actually block anyone who exceeds 500 characters in a post even only once.

I'm pretty sure some ask their Mastodon instance admins to deal with such people. Have them blocked instance-wide. Have their whole Hubzilla hub blocked on that Mastodon instance.

Or they try to use Mastodon's report feature to report that Hubzilla user to the admin of that Hubzilla hub, or they have their admin try and get into contact with the admin of that Hubzilla hub, just to have that Hubzilla user sanctioned for breaking some unwritten Mastodon etiquette by posting over 500 characters in one chunk.

Of course, they fail in both cases. Hubzilla doesn't support Mastodon's report feature, and mentioning Hubzilla users, in this case the admin, in a public post won't work either. Verdict: That Hubzilla hub is unmoderated and therefore has to be blocked or even out-right Fediblocked.

On the grounds of the assumption that Hubzilla works exactly like Mastodon. Which I'm trying to debunk with this series of posts.

As at least one of my polls has revealed, there seems to be a not insignificant number of Mastodon users who demand posts with over 500 characters be banned absolutely everywhere in the Fediverse. Including in conversation between users on other projects, regardless of whether overly long posts from that conversation might leak into Mastodon or not.

And, of course, there's the Mastodon police that try to urge non-Mastodon users to limit their posts to a maximum of 500 characters, regardless of whether they're aware that the user in question is on something else than Mastodon or not. They're fully convinced that Mastodon was here first, and all the other projects are intruders in Mastodon's Fediverse and have to follow Mastodon's rules.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterCount #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #500Characters #Mastodon
hub.netzgemeinde.euNetzgemeinde/Hubzilla
#mastodon
Public
Jupiter Rowland
A meme post can be
  • accessible by having a sufficiently detailed description of the image and explanation of the meme in the post itself
  • short enough for Mastodon users to be willing to read it (500 characters or fewer)
Choose one. Only one. You can't have both.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Accessibility #A11y #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #500Characters #CharacterCount
hub.netzgemeinde.euNetzgemeinde/Hubzilla
#CharacterCount
Continued thread
Public
Jupiter Rowland
Here are the stats for the post:

The summary and Mastodon-style content warning: 189 characters

The actual post: 889 characters, counted raw (as opposed to the Mastodon way with 23 characters per link and including the summary/content warning)

Alt-text: 920 characters

Image description: 25,420 characters, counted raw again, all headlines included

Hashtags: 147 characters in 13 hashtags, four of which are for triggering content warning filters

The whole post body: 26,312 characters

This is my third-longest image description to date.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #CharacterCount #AltText #ImageDescription
hub.netzgemeinde.euNetzgemeinde/Hubzilla
#imagedescription
Replied in thread
Public
Jupiter Rowland
@Angry Tea Lady As far as I can see, there is no general consensus or agreement upon what's the right amount of description for an image. I guess it also really depends on the image. Cat photographs can do with rather short descriptions while other pictures require descriptions so long that you couldn't possibly post them in one piece anywhere on most Mastodon instances. Good thing there's a Fediverse beyond Mastodon.

There are two things I keep in mind for my own image descriptions. One, if something is obscure and niche enough for average Fediverse users to not know anything about it, it needs to be described and explained. That'd better go into the post text itself, but since my image descriptions often grow extremely long, I put them there anyway.

Two, whenever an image description mentions what there is in a picture, blind or visually-impaired people are likely to want to know what it looks like. So any and all descriptions must include that. It's more ableist not to give visual descriptions than to give them and make the image description longer.

I myself tend to try to include whatever I read about that should be part of an image description. Just recently, someone wondered why so few people mention where they've taken a picture. Good thing I've been doing that ever since I've started writing detailied image descriptions.

It's just unfortunate that people rarely give feedback for image descriptions, especially without being asked for it first. My own image descriptions regularly grow so long that they exceed any idea of excessive. What few people have given me feedback so far, including one who has done it out of the blue, liked them, but such a small number of people couldn't possibly represent all of the Fediverse. Then again, I hardly post images anymore because of how long it takes me to describe them, and fewer images mean even less feedback.

But if it looks like I can get away with image descriptions that are way longer than some essays, I think it's hard for alt-text within Mastodon's 1,500-character limit to be too long.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #CharacterCount #Accessibility #A11y
hub.netzgemeinde.euNetzgemeinde/Hubzilla
#a11y
Replied in thread
Public
Jupiter Rowland
@Stefan Bohacek Let's not limit this to only image descriptions in alt-text in toots from vanilla Mastodon.

How long is too long for an image description in general, regardless of whether it's in the alt-text or the post text? Or specifically when it's part of the post text? Is there such a thing as too long?

I'm asking because while I'm indirectly bound to Mastodon's 1,500-character limit for alt-text because Mastodon cuts everything that's longer permanently off, I'm not bound to Mastodon's 500-character limit for posts because I'm someplace very different from Mastodon. And my image descriptions tend to grow unimaginably long.

They have to be that long in order to be sufficiently informative. My own pictures are always from non-real-world places that nearly nobody knows, and so they only contain stuff that nearly nobody knows. And they don't always focus on one element so that everything else can be swept under the rug. So I have to describe a lot, and I have to explain a lot.

Let's just say I can no longer write full detailed and sufficiently informative image descriptions within Mastodon's constraints, not even within 1,500 characters. Even a carefully chosen camera angle that shows as few surrounding and background details as possible plus cropping away some more details won't let me stay within the 1,500-character limit.

Now, the thing is I hardly get any feedback for my image descriptions. Most of my image posts get none at all. Some sighted users say they're generally too long, but they never criticise any particular description of mine. Instead, they go by the character counts I tell them.

On the other hand, I've just received praise from a blind user for a post (content warning: eye contact) with two pictures and my longest image description to date: The preamble for both images has slightly over 1,300 characters, the description for the first image has almost exactly 40,000 characters, the one for the second image which references and relies on the former has about 6,750 characters.

Mastodon's alt-text police seems not to have discovered my posts yet, probably because none of them follows me. That, or they're perfectly okay with what I write. Without any feedback, I can't know. So I'm asking all of you.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #CharacterCount
The Dragon's CavePatrick W (@BrailleScreen@dragonscave.space)@jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu I just wanted to share that this is super cool and amazing and useful that you describe in this much detail! I'm a details person, myself. So being able to understand everything I can is super helpful to me as one who has always been blind and thus doesn't understand the random details like that. I'm also going back through various posts; that's why I am seeing this so late. Thanks for all you do!
#CharacterCount
Continued thread
Public
Jupiter Rowland
The above post (this is a reply in a thread) in numbers:
  • Title (invisible for users of Mastodon and several other Fediverse projects): 61 characters
  • Summary (= content warning on Mastodon): 320 characters, including three content warnings
  • Main post, not counting markup: 770 characters
  • Alt-text, first image: 866 characters
  • Alt-text, second image: 860 characters
  • Image descriptions, preamble including title line, not counting markup: 1,329 characters
  • Image description, first image, including title line, not counting markup: 39,932 characters
  • Image description, second image, including title line, not counting markup: 6,757 characters
  • Hashtags: 16 hashtags, 8 of them content warnings, 182 characters
  • Whole post including extra blank lines, but excluding the title, the summary and alt-texts and not counting markup: cs. 48,977 characters

My previous record for image description length (38,650 characters) has been broken.

#CharacterCount #AltText #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #CW #CWs
hub.netzgemeinde.euNetzgemeinde/Hubzilla
#cws
Replied in thread
Public
Dick Smiths Fair Go Supporters

@armact
These days there are none that we know of, but good news is Mastodon caps URLs #characterCount to the low twenties, this means even if you URL is 500 characters long, not only will the scrolling user only see about 25 characters, the character count only goes up by about 23 characters.

Other instances have larger character counts typically, so that's good too.

So there is no real need for #URLShortening on online social networks.

If you want us to a look at some, happy to help.

Continued thread
Public
Cleo of Topless Topics

btw as you may have noticed, my post is nearly 5000 characters long--way longer than anything you could ever post to Twitter, or all the Masto servers (mostly started by ex-Twitter users) who leave theirs at the default 500 characters. Opinions differ, but again as an ex- #Twitter veteran, I much prefer being able to put all my thoughts in one post rather than have to string it along in a bunch of threaded posts (which, again, are ripe for plucking out of context to be used by accounts with large followings to sic their audience on smaller accounts for "righteous bullying" as I tend to call it). So I'd love to see an emphasis on informing new instance creators that you don't HAVE to keep your server settings at the default #CharacterCount -- and there are numerous instances I tried out but ended up leaving because, having gotten used to the luxurious room for a nearly blog-post-length post here on @Eldritch.Cafe, I struggle to tolerate having to condense myself back to "shouting headline" length barely more generous than Twitter (unless you pay for your account now, I guess). "after you've tasted ambrosia, it's impossible to settle for water" or whatever that phrase is.

ExploreLive feeds
About