3) A large part of Medium’s success with the average Jan Doe is it’s stellar usability and aesthetic. If you don’t match that, forget it.

4) There are a lot of trolls on Medium for commenting reasons. Desiring a M model for commenting reasons may backfire. Not everyone wants to entertain comments.

5) A blog post is not ‘longform’ (unless upwards of ~3K words). Why not just custom extend Masto’s char limit to an equivalent of 500 words?

@wion I keep telling people that extending the limit and allowing for simple emphasis and strong emphasis would do wonders. Google+ has shown that some people will use it to write amazing posts. But I’ve met a resistance on Mastodon which seems to be deeply rooted and I don’t get it.

@kensanata

I agree. Masto if perfectly capable of being a ‘social’ blog tool right now. Just needs needs more characters, some rudimentary formatting syntax, and a slight layout change away from these silly colums. Done.

@wion @kensanata
you'd also need to auto-collapse posts longer than 500 chars, in order not to ruin the microblog experience.

@Wolf480pl @wion Maybe. But I’m doing fine with Amaroq which does not – and some people I am following do occasionally post longer text.

@kensanata @wion well, I use mastodon web frontend, and I like its columns as long as people post stuff below 500 chars. But when someone from an instance with different limit posts a 5000 char post, it just fills the whole column, and is a big nuissance.