why does this have to be hard

[brin_bellway]

[arguably cw: politics]


Does anyone know of a good Mastodon instance with a decently high character limit that's accepting new people?

The Pleroma instance I was using to very occasionally like and/or comment on people's Mastodon posts seems to have died while I wasn't looking, and it's very hard to find an open Pleroma instance that doesn't itself suck *and* hasn't been preemptively banned by a lot of the Mastodon instances with interesting people on them. Apparently Mastodon has acquired a left-wing reputation while Pleroma has acquired a right-wing reputation, and so now if you want a character limit above 500 a whole lot of people will assume you're a Nazi.

(I'm more willing to self-host stuff *in general* than I once was, but given how little I use my Fediverse account I don't think I'm currently willing to spend money on it.)

I'm this close to joining the neutral default mastodon.social and making all comments above 500 characters in the form of links to Dreamwidth posts.

(Maybe I should just do that, but I would prefer a less bullshit answer. Why does this tradeoff exist?! This tradeoff should not exist! How the fuck did we end up with a Fediverse where you have to choose between breathing room for your posts and being allowed to talk to Blue Tribe members?!)

Comments

[yvannairie]

What the fuck? I thought there was a near universal hatred of restrictive character limits specifically b/c it's much easier for fascist dipshits to boil their talking points down into slogans?

[brin_bellway]

The worst part is that Mastodon doesn't have to suck! 500 characters is just a *default*: individual instances can override that (without even breaking federation with short-post instances)! But most of them haven't, and I haven't found any lists of instances where you can filter by character limit.

(In fact, dragon.style's admin *did* override its character limit with a much more reasonable 7,777 one! So you would think she would *understand* the desire to make non-short posts! But when I tried to reply to a monsterblue@dragon.style post using brinbellway@outerheaven.club (an instance carefully chosen for as much neutrality as I could find), the outerheaven.club admin warned me that it wouldn't go through properly because dragon.style has banned outerheaven.club. They said she never told them why, and there was no clear inciting incident. I asked the admin if they'd gotten the same impressions I'd gotten re: political leanings and a default of mistrust between Mastodon users and Pleroma users, and they had.)

I don't know if I've heard much about character limits specifically making it easier for *fascist* dipshits: the usual complaint I hear about Twitter is that it makes it easier for dipshits of *every* stripe to boil their talking points down into slogans, so you end up with dipshits-wearing-one-colour-uniform and dipshits-wearing-a-different-colour-uniform shouting slogans at each other and nothing useful or pleasant happening. Of course, one of the usual praises I hear for Mastodon is that 500 characters is so much roomier than Twitter: I might be projecting, but I wonder if maybe people who got trapped in the birdsite's network effect have had to lower their standards so much that Mastodon looks amazing in comparison.

(It's not like you *can't* make short posts on Dreamwidth or Pleroma or what-have-you! You just get a *choice*!)

Maybe it was some accidental founder effect that spiralled out of control? Maybe Pleroma just happened to get a critical mass of people-who'd-been-kicked-off-of-other-social-media-for-being-too-illiberal early on while Mastodon didn't. (Apparently one of the biggest Pleroma instances is radfem, and I *did* come across a genuine--or at least explicit; they might have been trolling for all I know--Nazi instance.) And a lot of the Pleroma people who *aren't* radfems or Nazis are there because they're FLOSS (free/libre open-source software) enthusiasts: I tend to be fond of such enthusiasts, but a lot of liberals these days seem to have had bad experiences with them and would take it as another mark against Pleroma.

[sigmaleph]

I've been like on the periphery of this whole thing but never close enough to say with any confidence what it was about. I thiiink there were some complaints about specific implementation-level details about privacy or something but I could be totally misremembering here. I do think most of the answer is founder effects but I forget if there were specific reasons earlier pleroma instances attracted certain kinds of people.

>(an instance carefully chosen for as much neutrality as I could find), the outerheaven.club admin warned me that it wouldn't go through properly because dragon.style has banned outerheaven.club.

I know nothing about outerheaven.club, but I would not be surprised to learn that same neutrality is the reason. at a glance, they don't seem to have e.g. an anti-hate-speech rule? tolerating various sufficiently unpleasant opinions being expressed without banning the relevant users is a quick way to get your instance blocked.

[brin_bellway]

>>I would not be surprised to learn that same neutrality is the reason.

Yeah, I've been thinking that might be it. Maybe I should try wolfhowl.me for the amount of left it screams. I mean I *do* in fact have a complicated relationship with species so there's that, but I don't really talk about it much these days. I don't feel like I should have to openly swear allegiance to *any* political faction just to share mask tips and like/favourite/kudos/whatever people's shitposts and maybe, like, commiserate about badly designed website interfaces or something, but such is the world we live in. At least it's my native culture.

[sigmaleph]

yeah

I am... a lot more conscious of what I post when I post there vs tumblr/dreamwidth and it is probably part of the reason i use it much less.

I respect people's right to have whatever walls they like in their gardens but, well. doesn't mean i'm comfortable in them.