I recently saw a post on Mastodon asking for recommendations for an instance that allowed more characters per toot. Of course I recommended that person migrate to social.vivaldi.net with its very generous limit of 1337 characters. To my thinking, if you can’t express a cogent thought in 1337 characters, you need to think about it more until you can distill it into a shorter post.
It brought to mind the day when Twitter went from a character limit of 140 characters to 280. At the time, I was dead-set against it. For the same reasons I prefer smaller limits on any social media site. Limits enforce brevity. Brevity ensures the author has taken the time to think seriously about a topic enough to condense it into something that can be expressed briefly and cogently.
Today, X, the shell of the former Twitter, allows tweets of up to four THOUSAND characters. That naturally has the result of rambling, incoherent screeds. On my Mastodon account, I try to keep my toots as short as possible. If I go beyond 500 characters, I feel I’ve likely done a disservice.
We travel often, and shake our heads at the sheer volume of gigantic bags people trundle around. This will sound curmudgeonly, but I honestly believe the roller bag contributes to a worse form of tourism. I’ve seen people bring multiple, very specific outfits, every type of shoe, pillows and blankets from home. Those people look more like refugees than tourists.
When we travel, we each bring one small carry-on backpack.
Because of this, we’re freer to move around, unburdened by the caravan of bags. We never worry about our luggage being sent to some unknown destination because we carry it all with us. Those self-imposed limits give us the freedom to travel swiftly and nimbly, able to make changes without stress.
Other limitations, like tight budgets, spur creativity. I worked for a small company at one point, and we couldn’t afford the big-name subscriptions to manage our infrastructure. So we had to be resourceful and code our own in-house applications. It saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars to use elsewhere.
I love limits. I hope you’ll learn to see the limits in your life as opportunities for creativity and invitations to greater freedom.
Hello. 🙂
I was attracted to your post in order to opine against it BUT reading to the end got me thinking and you know what I think I’m going to come half way on this. I’m a former Mastodon user largely because I got frustrated with the 500 char limit. After a couple of decades of blogging my writing tends to be very verbose and I got frustrated having to chop, edit and re-write just to suit some arbitrary constraints. Then I found Sharkey (another Fediverse Social Media platform) which had 4’000 characters. The admin of my instance randomly put that up to 8’000. Then I found Akkoma: I did have 37’000 on one server but have settled on one with a mere 10’000 available characters and I couldn’t be happier. On both Sharkey and Akkoma it feels like I have room to breathe, to spread out, to talk around certain ideas more thorough. I can drop single sentences or talk at length and I love that freedom.
But then I think back to my training as an artist or in the history of home computing where very often Limitation can inspire innovation. Limits do serve useful purposes.
What a thoughtful and wonderful reply. I’m glad you took the time! I’m unfamiliar with Sharkey or Akkoma, but I’m glad there are Fediverse solutions for everyone. Much nicer than the one-size-fits-all of a centralized social media site.
Once again, thank you!