@ivory is there any hope, Ivory will implement thread posting, allowing users to write a long text, which is automatically broken up into a multi-post thread, so we can compose and post the entire text at once?
Right now, I am composing long posts as individual posts, and people start replying when my 1/3 is out, while I am still working on 2/3 and 3/3. Confusing for the followers and not ideal.
@randahl Normally putting a number at the start of the post such as (1/3) would help let people understand that you are doing a thread often but that could be a cool feature.
@randahl Nope. The design is pretty much done. But we have a huge list of other tasks to get through and our new compose view is going to be the work of a new app in itself. It's going to take time, but will be great when it's done.
Speaking as a database programmer, it is entirely trivial to get the desired performance without a length limit in the back end. If you really want fixed length records, you can ... just do it. And simply stitch together multiple records as needed on the fly when serving up posts to the front end.
On the front end, it's even easier, thanks to CSS. I dislike CSS, but it sure makes a lot of things easy - such as a pixel height limit beyond which it gives a scroll bar.
@isaackuo I believe you. And in that case, it could be really interesting to hear from the Mastodon developers. If you want to, you might be able to find answers on their GitHub discussions.
@randahl@isaackuo
There's a functional benefit - posting as a thread allows others to interact (reply, boost, favourite...) with sections they find interesting.
Longer articles without such a capability don't fit that well in this medium.
Granted, automatic post splitting doesn't work that well for this, it would mash together unrelated thoughts and split thoughts between posts in a rude and inconsiderate manner :)
Quintessentially, the way Mastodon.social is is because that's what the Mastodon devs want Mastodon to be. The ability to post with a "cut" for "read more" is an unofficial mod to the basic Mastodon server software.
That said, all Mastodon pods support storing these posts and showing them. The Mastodon devs aren't "forcing" their way on us all. We can choose a pod with that mod.
It's not always that simple, of course. The pod I wanted to move to... oh well I'm still working on it.