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Comment by klabb3 | Hacker News Reader

As a curious bystander, I am very excited about both the social/ideological and technical merits of Mastodon, but I would never use (what appears to be) a Twitter-like format myself. I prefer content-centric over people-centric and medium/long form text over short form. Even Facebook was a better fit for me, in certain situations (primarily private groups) than Twitter is.

Does anyone know (1) if the current Twitter-like format is due to an explicit affinity towards it within the community - or due to some other reason and (2) will Mastodon allow for other formats in the future in some shape or form?

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The activitypub standard isn’t limited to tweets. There are Reddit-like and YouTube-like implementations.[0]

The privacy would depend on the server rules. You could have a long/medium form blog that is federated using activitypub.

But there’s a significant technology toll to pay to get these up and running in my experience. It’s still not like signing up for Twitter or facebook. Which probably makes for better communities once you’ve managed to make it inside.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub

> There are Reddit-like and YouTube-like implementations.

https://join-lemmy.org/ and https://joinpeertube.org/ that is. More on https://fediverse.party/.

@klabb3 The underlying protocol - ActivityPub - does not have the same limits imposed by proprietary platforms (e.g. Twitter, etc.). Most constraints that exist on platforms like Mastodon, etc., are usually decisions made for a partiocular purpose (e.g. any character limit on posts in Mastodon is becausse the intended function of Mastodon is for microblogging, etc.). Different platforms in the fediverse - that leverage ActivityPub protocol - implement different constraints for similar reasons; namely, choice.

That being said, for your interest on content and less on interactions - if i accurately understood what you're asking about - may i suggest looking into the write.as platform. See https://write.as/about One can self-host this if inclined, but there's also a paid plan thrhough this company...but the gist is that its designed for much longer-form blogging (and other related functions too)...but still leveraging ActivityPub undernath which could be used for interactions if desired...but its core premise is much longer form blogs. I'm sure there may be other long-form platforms, but this is the one that comes to mind for me (at least for leveraging protocols similar to mastodon). Cheers!

Thanks!

Pleroma is a Mastodon-compatible (i.e. it federates with it) competitor that allows longer form posts.

I don't use it myself, but I often notice users from Pleroma servers writing much longer messages than are allowed on Mastodon.

I recall a saying: Pleroma does what Mastodon't.

i installed pleroma on my 1 gb vps just today. havent had time to play with it but it is hopefully going to be a sanctuary for the family

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