Mastodon is a microblogging service, so not meant for large bodies of text. This is why the text entry box is small, the columns are somewhat narrow (especially in deck mode) etc.
Platforms like https://writefreely.org/ , which are designed to be for blogging and long-form writing, are the place to write this. Write Freely federates so one can follow accounts and interact with posts via Mastodon etc.
I used to think this as well, but lately I've noticed these stories which span multiple tweets have a common feature, which seems to emerge out of the size constraint regardless of the author: concise, beat-driven storytelling.
The size limit results in each post being a coherent sentence or three, advancing the story by a small but consistent amount. If these same authors used the medium of a free-form blog post to tell the same stories, I think we'd see much more meandering, and the pacing wouldn't be as consistent.
Not saying I don't enjoy a good blog post, but for what it is, I don't mind the (1/x) tweet story format as much as I used to.
I agree. I've always hated the twitter-style threads people write. I can't stand it. There are websites that compile a thread into a better reading blog style format however.
That's a good point, at least Twitter has third-party tools like Thread Reader to mitigate this annoyance. I wonder if there is an equivalent for Mastodon?
It is actually only the mastodon implementation that forces the size limit. It can actually be any size. I forked the original repo and had to change 2 variables to be able to toot 5000 characters instead of 500.
