Hubzilla's unlimited character count; CW: Fediverse meta, non-Mastodon Fediverse meta
Posts from Hubzilla can be long. Absolutely staggeringly long.
For one, where Mastodon usually has a 500-character limit, Hubzilla doesn't have any character limit at all.
Besides, Hubzilla users make a lot of use of this. Character limits aren't part of their culture because when Hubzilla was launched, there was no Mastodon yet.
#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #FediTips #FediverseTips #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #Hubzilla
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
So that sounds like the reasonable solution to the problem.
If a user doesn't want long posts, let them avoid long posts.
That leaves the rest of us free to enjoy those, and we all get the experiences we want.
i've seen this happen recently, when very popular accounts were shadowbanned, i.e., their posts excluded from searches, on a large mastodon instance because a few users complained about them.
the fediverse isn't really decentralized; a few large instances account for most of the user base. because mastodon doesn't have any privacy controls except banning users or whole servers, those are used liberally. someone feels disturbed by what you write, or how you write, complains about you, bam, you're banned.
@phani I'd say the issue of instance admins overexerting their authorities over users' feeds is a much larger and more important issue that needs to be challenged head on, outside of the question of post length.
So many left platforms like #Twitter specifically to get away from that kind of meddling in news feeds, so it should be highlighted when it starts to show up here.
I always promote the norm of empowering users to make such decisions instead of leaving it to #Fediverse admins, giving users the tools they need.
It's a cultural question, and all we can do is try to nudge the culture in the direction we think is better.
