This is my first post on my new blog – although really it’s an old blog revived, including the weird domain name.
I haven’t really got a plan for this yet, but given the slow death cycle that most of the big platforms are finding themselves in, I thought it might be worth trying to restart my own space to talk about whatever
I’ve been messing around with the WordPress ActivityPub plugin, so you may well be seeing this on Mastodon or some other fediverse platform. If you want to follow me, my handle is @dan@rodentdisco.co.uk
Otherwise, talk to you later 🙂.
I mentioned in my first post that I’ve set up this blog with ActivityPub support, so I figured it was worth going over how to…
So, a question…
I did a Mastodon search today on “Mastodon long posts” and noticed this.
I do long writing / research posts and could really use a good (and also, cost-effective) way of doing long posts, but it sounds like that’s not possible on mastodon.social, but I seem to remember hearing that it was server specific. Are there ways / places you know of on Mastodon sites to do this? Any examples you know of?
Alternately, would it be practical / practicable to set up something like what you set up, creating a long post and then linking to it, in such a way as to make it pretty accessible for Mastodon users?
Is there any way for those of us on mastodon.social to get Mastodon to allow a long post?
Thanks for your comment!
To answer your question – most Mastodon servers have a 500 character limit, and while this can be adjusted this requires admin access and some major config changes, so unless you want to run and host your own server it’s not really practical.
Mastodon does however federate with other services that have higher character limits however. This blog is using a standard WordPress install and the recently-updated-to-1.0 ActivityPub plugin that allows the blog to be federated and followed by Mastodon users. (you can go to my guide to see how I set this up). At the moment the plugin is only available for self hosted WordPress sites, but it’s being tested for WordPress.com right now – you can follow the lead developer of the plugin at @pfefferle@mastodon.social. You can also adjust the setting to send the full content or just a link.
There are also other (paid) services like micro.blog and write.as that offer a similar service – I haven’t used them myself but they seem to work very well. If you really want to try with your own Mastodon server, then you may want to check out masto.host for hosting and setup.
Hope this is helpful!