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Giving you more characters

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Re: Giving you more characters

#91

Post by mintplant »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #59
mintplant wrote: post #44

Mastodon [0] has a default character limit of 500, which individual instances can turn up or down as they see fit (Mastodon is a federated network). Hundreds of thousands of people use it and the social dynamics work just fine, or even better, with the additional breathing room for expression. To me Twitter's attachment to such a low cap feels like an anachronism. [0] https://joinmastodon.org

Very cool but too nerdy. Visiting that site requires clicking "Get Started" which then directs you to a list of instances, from which you choose a server and sign up (not sure because in the age of 140 chars don't have the attention span to follow through). Without doing that there's no content short of a bunch of reasons why Mastodon is open and free, but the average user doesn't care about that. It's kind of preach…

You could point people to https://mastodon.social, the "flagship" instance, or directly to any other instance's homepage. There's something of a word-of-mouth aspect here, in that instances targeted toward particular communities can be more attractive to people within those communities than general-purpose social networks.

There's an instance chooser wizard at https://instances.social/, but I can see someone looking at that and calling it too complicated as well.

Re: Giving you more characters

#92

Post by hk__2 »

slg wrote: post #47

It is clear that people want to use Twitter to say things longer than 140 characters as the rise in popularity of long threaded Tweets would attest. It is just strange that Twitter would seemingly prefer to abandon their iconic 140 limit over making threading a native function of their platform.

> It is just strange that Twitter would seemingly prefer to abandon their iconic 140 limit over making threading a native function of their platform.

They don’t: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/10/tweetstorm-button/

Re: Giving you more characters

#93

Post by coldtea »

madeofpalk wrote: post #78

Twitter seems to have the worst luck/timing when it comes to 'new features'. Last time it was Users: Please help get rid of these nazis Twitter: ROUND PROFILE PICS! this time its Users: Please help prevent nuclear war Twitter: HOW ABOUT LONGER TWEETS!

Because otherwise the role of Twitter is thwarting nazis and preventing nuclear war?

Re: Giving you more characters

#95

Post by avar »

kristianc wrote: post #74
sorenjan wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use Twitter myself, but I think the reason behind the limit is that SMS can send 140 bytes in each message. When sending regular text messages a 7-bit alphabet is usually used, for 160 characters in total.

The SMS limit was decided when an engineer working for German Telecom decided on the limit after typing up a bunch of sample sentences. Twitter based their limit on the SMS limit (140 + user address).

Excluding the username from the 140 character limit was only changed this year: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-character-limit

Re: Giving you more characters

#96

Post by madeofpalk »

mintplant wrote: post #91
aaron-lebo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool but too nerdy. Visiting that site requires clicking "Get Started" which then directs you to a list of instances, from which you choose a server and sign up (not sure because in the age of 140 chars don't have the attention span to follow through). Without doing that there's no content short of a bunch of reasons why Mastodon is open and free, but the average user doesn't care about that. It's kind of preach…

You could point people to https://mastodon.social , the "flagship" instance, or directly to any other instance's homepage. There's something of a word-of-mouth aspect here, in that instances targeted toward particular communities can be more attractive to people within those communities than general-purpose social networks. There's an instance chooser wizard at https://instances.social/ , but I can see someone lookin…

> Mastodon

> Mastodon hosted on mastodon.social

Umm what?

> What is mastodon.social?

> mastodon.social is the "flagship" instance, belonging to the Mastodon project.

...sure.

Re: Giving you more characters

#97

Post by pg_bot »

I'm convinced there is no one at twitter that understands why they succeeded as a company. Their management team continually makes decisions that are reminiscent of shuffling around deck chairs on the titanic. I get the feeling that they only exist due to inertia which is a death sentence for most tech companies.

Re: Giving you more characters

#98

Post by tanilama »

madeofpalk wrote: post #78

Twitter seems to have the worst luck/timing when it comes to 'new features'. Last time it was Users: Please help get rid of these nazis Twitter: ROUND PROFILE PICS! this time its Users: Please help prevent nuclear war Twitter: HOW ABOUT LONGER TWEETS!

Well, Twitter is not going to kill itself for the welling being of mankind after all....

Re: Giving you more characters

#99

Post by madeofpalk »

coldtea wrote: post #93
madeofpalk wrote: post #78

Twitter seems to have the worst luck/timing when it comes to 'new features'. Last time it was Users: Please help get rid of these nazis Twitter: ROUND PROFILE PICS! this time its Users: Please help prevent nuclear war Twitter: HOW ABOUT LONGER TWEETS!

Because otherwise the role of Twitter is thwarting nazis and preventing nuclear war?

Hey, I'm not sure what they can or should do about these things. Just pointing out they seems to have the worst timing.

Re: Giving you more characters

#100

Post by freedomben »

coldtea wrote: post #93
madeofpalk wrote: post #78

Twitter seems to have the worst luck/timing when it comes to 'new features'. Last time it was Users: Please help get rid of these nazis Twitter: ROUND PROFILE PICS! this time its Users: Please help prevent nuclear war Twitter: HOW ABOUT LONGER TWEETS!

Because otherwise the role of Twitter is thwarting nazis and preventing nuclear war?

Sadly, these days it seems that the tech companies have become the content police :sigh:

The only thing worse is that there are people crying out for it.

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