There is no rational reason for Mastodon to limit posts to 500 characters by default.
If the limit was 100s of KB, people who still wanted to divide every thought up into a thread still could; nothing stopping them.
But if someone wanted to post a gigantic essay, they also could, and I'd see a little "More >>" link and I could ignore them faster.
We have decades of history proving that length limits do not make people concise: they just make people post threads.
Emphatically just an opinion
@jwz I think character limits are part of the gamified experience so many people are, unfortunately, looking for.
An awful lot of people are looking for rapid fire, exciting, firehoses of thoughtless content pouring through, with responses flying left and right and clicks and and and
Longer compositions slow that down.
People post threads? Well that helps keep the firehose moving! That's more things to click on and react to! Weee!
sigh
The post limits are not my taste, but even more, I think they represent a really toxic side of social media, the side that is obsessed with clicking and stats of interactions ahead of anything actually meaningful.
#Mastodon should not have adopted this aspect of #Twitter and #Fediverse in general should not encourage it in new interfaces.
Just my opinion, of course.
