Subj : Re: Mastodon / Fediverse
To   : AKAcastor
From : Warpslide
Date : Thu Jun 06 2024 06:02 pm

On 06 Jun 2024, AKAcastor said the following...

 AK> I see your weather reports regularly and hadn't even considered that you
 AK> had automated it. :)

I had to use ImageMagick to turn the weather forecast into an image to get around the character limit.  It's funny how I can only post 500 characters of text but posting a 32k image of text with up to 1500 characters of alt-text (which more than fits the whole forecast) is perfectly ok.

 AK> Good point.  I think the character limit is set per-instance (I
 AK> sometimes see very long posts from other instances) but when I post on
 AK> mastodon.social I do run into the post limits.  So I guess either
 AK> character limits would need to be known/enforced on the BBS end (or
 AK> messages just get cut off if too long), or any gateway would need to be
 AK> connected to a mastodon server with larger post limits.  (I think I lean
 AK> toward 'keep the messages short'.)

Some of the jokes I post with the joke bot are longer than 500 characters (but not by much) so I split those into two messages and prefix the toots with 1/2 & 2/2.  The 2nd toot is a reply to the first to keep them connected.

This could work with ftn messages that are less than 1000 characters, but longer posts could get messy.  Maybe spinning up your own instance with larger limit would be easier, or consider something like lemmy which has a 10,000 character limit by default.  Lemmy uses ActivityPub, so you can follow those accounts from Mastodon.

There's also Matrix which is more like discord which has "up to ~65200 bytes" available for messages.


Jay

.... I only know two tunes.  One is 'Rule Brittania' -- and the other isn't

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Northern Realms (21:3/110)

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