Small Character Limits are a Good Thing, Actually
2025/Jan 18
I’m an avid user of Mastodon, a microblogging social network designed to resist centralized control. It’s design is similar to Twitter—before its takeover—emphasizing short posts of a less serious nature.
The design of most social media apps creates an emphasis on current content—posts and shares which are recent—to the detriment of older content. Even without an algorithm, checking the feed of any Mastodon instance will mainly focus on current posts. This is mainly due to a lack of index pages like what you’d see on blogs, where you’d see a listing of all posts which have ever been made. It’s therefore more difficult to reference posts on Mastodon, granting it a semi-ephemeral quality.
Most instances of Mastodon not run by the Mastodon project tend to increase the maximum character count of posts from its default of 500 to a more generous count in the thousands. This move makes it easier to write longer posts with more thoughtful content. I think this is a mistake.
Due to the design of social networks, posts are disorganized. The absence of indices makes it more difficult to trawl a person’s Mastodon profile to look for good posts to read. Because posts don’t have titles and are often quite short, any index that might exist would end up being very poor. Thoughtful posts that aren’t immediately picked up by followers or other onlookers will effectively be lost to time. If you miss your opportunity, the audience for the things you make may never find you. Even if you do accumulate followers, your older posts are unlikely to be found again. By implementing a frugal character limit, social media sites artificially introduce friction against thoughtful content. These sites become a place for silly jokes, cat pictures, and status updates.
Conversely, if I started to post more frivolous updates to this blog, the index would be poisoned by these low-quality posts, and the blog would lose its value to readers. Why would anyone want to wade through a sea of nothing in order to find the few genuinely interesting posts that exist?
Where a low character limit becomes a massive boon is that Mastodon does not (and is unlikely to ever) have a curation algorithm which artificially downranks external links. Mastodon doesn’t want to keep you on the app as long as possible, so it can also be used as a way to promote things outside of the network.
Mastodon’s design decisions combined with its more technically inclined culture results in an app that synergizes excellently with traditional blogs and other websites with high quality content. It’s too difficult to post deep analysis to Mastodon, so I often find myself instead writing posts to this blog. By making it more difficult to do certain things on their app, Mastodon gives me a great reason to write more posts here. The app thus makes itself more valuable, by encouraging me to write more on this blog and make it a more complete collection of my thoughts.
I’m thankful Mastodon makes it difficult not to post on my own site.