people who do not write for a living tend to ramble in text. The limit forces people to be brief which means I can engage with more ideas and ask questions if that person interests me. I remember LiveJournal and how you'd read like... Two short stories from two friends about it their days and miss most of my feed.

Also, I think the limits reduces the cost of hosting, but don't quote me on that.

I'm not sure about this. People were writing threads with Twitter's 140 characters limit, they kept writing threads with Twitter's 280 characters limit, and they now are writing threads with Mastodon's 500 characters limit.

Of course I can't know for sure how much longer posts would be without this default limit in place, but what I do know is that this limit isn't the end-all-be-all of microblogging given the continued existence of multipart threads.

As for the performance gain of shorter posts, it is absolutely insignificant compared to the storage size requirement of uploaded images.

You're missing the point. People work around the character limit, which means they absolutely don't care what kind of blogging platform Mastodon is. The lack of formatting already makes it obvious it isn't suitable for longer-form articles. The character limit is just punitive.

Also please don't assume people you're replying to are using the Mastodon web interface (think about mobile apps), for example I'm not even using Mastodon at all! And while #Friendica does a good job at gathering threads, it can only do so much with the posts it knows about.

Sorry, but I'm not missing the point, I'm just unconvinced that the character limit in #Mastodon is the fundamental issue, as much as the fact that there is no “best” answer to the question: who should #ActivityPub messages be delivered to?
Followers and mentions are the obvious answer, but anything beyond that is additional load on the network and servers, which becomes more and more important as the number of users and messages grows.

1/6

Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAICS, if one follows the #ActivityPub protocol in its most conservative sense, thread holes are inevitable regardless of platform, becase the only instance that is guaranteed to have the full thread is the host instance of the OP.
Any other instance will only have what they get through federation (i.e. messages from its users, to its users or by people followed by one of its users).

2/6

Platforms can backfill or use other APIs to retrieve the full graph of a post, but that's additional work that the platform chooses to do. So, how well does this extra work scale?
I applaud Friendica for doing this, since this undoubtedly improves the user experience, but how well will this scale when the number of users grows by a couple orders of magnitude? Especially when it can't use its own efficient API to do the filling?

3/6

The opportunity to backfill more is being discussed for some Mastodon features <github.com/mastodon/mastodon/i…>), and by and large the main issue considered is: how much extra strain does this put on the network?
Personally I'd really much prefer the experience to be seamless for me as a user, but if this is implemented at a cost that ends up affecting the UX in other ways, is it worth it?

4/6

And it might be easy to dismiss the thing saying «yeah, but that's just because Mastodon is inefficient and the character limit compounds the issue by forcing people to post more messages», but that's only true up to a point. And I'd really like to see the distribution of thread message counts in #Mastodon vs #Friendica. I don't expect the Mastodon ones to be much higher on average than the Friendica ones.

5/6

FWIW, I fully agree with your “It didn't have to be like this”, but at best Mastodon's character limit is just something that makes some fundamental limitations of #ActivityPub more manifest. To me, it's in the same category as the need to open an external link in my instance context to be able to interact with the corresponding object.
Rather, one would have to ask why people insist on using the wrong platform (aside from lack of knowledge).

6/6

@tk erm, I'm pretty sure Mastodon has support for them, just named context instead.

MissKey is the one that doesn't, because missed keys it is.