Mastodon versus my father's dessert

So, I matured an enlightening revelation these last couple of days. The key to the success of microblogging wasn't the influx of Important Names to Twitter or people discovering they could read the news there or whatever.

The key to its success was the way my father eats dessert.

When my father eats dessert —say, for example, a Rama di Napoli— he doesn't take the whole thing at once. Instead, he cuts it in half, and then maybe each half again in half, and then eats one of those quarters. And then the next one. And the one after. And even the last one in the end.

So in the end he eats the whole thing, but aiming at only a piece of it at a time.

Now, leaving aside that when he does this with a Cannolo siciliano he's probably violating the Geneva Convention, this approach to eating dessert is obviously only a psychological trick, to pretend you're going to eat less, whereas ultimately you eat just the same as before (modulo some crumbs, possibly, but of course you can collect them and eat them too …)

And this is why microblogging won.

I recently had a debate with @hypolite​@friendica.mrpetovan.com about what's even the point for the 500 character limit, when people keep abusing threading to post much longer stuff, split into several chunks, that are also inefficient to propagate through the Fediverse, to boot! (And yes, this discussion is what triggered the revelation.)

But that's the thing, actually: not only the character limit motivates challenging creative initiative such as the 500-character MicroFiction known as TootFic, it actually fits extremely well in the (arguably deplorable) reading approach that has been taking over, based on short blurbs and immediate satisfaction. And yes, it's just a trick, but it works.

Just like my father ends up eating all the fragments of the dessert, the reader of a microblogging split post (such as the original of this one on the Fediverse) will most likely end up reading the whole thing, but it being in snippets both encourages a different writing style and entices the reader with a promise of brevity.

Presented with a wall of text that may requires 5 to 10 minutes to read, the casual reader may bounce off because of considerations of lack of time or prospected boredom. The split structure encourages reading, calling to the «oh, it's just one small piece of text, I can stop whenever I want» mentality.

It's the same mechanism by which people will bounce away at the prospect of watching a 3+ hours movie, but will happily binge-watch 6 30-minutes episodes of their favourite TV series. It's not the length of the content. It's the way it's presented, and the way it is written.

Because yes, of course this also affects writing. You still have a 500 character limit per post, and while you can essentially ignore that and write the whole thing ignoring the limit, splitting at the last word, adding a continuation emoji or character, and then go on, where microblogging gives its best is when each post in the thread has its own self-contained sense, just like a single episode in a long, far-reaching story arc.

I once read a seasoned comic artist remarking the striking difference between webcomics and traditional media, due to the different rhythm imposed by publishing one page at a time, rather than a whole volume at once. And in some sense, this is what microblogging is to traditional long-post blogs.

There's something I can add as a personal note now that I'm adapting the original Mastodon thread in article format. The success of microblogging should not be surprising: it's the divide et impera of the writing crafts.

For me, it has been a great stimulus to get back to writing, with several recent articles born first as Mastodon threads and later rearranged (and often expanded) in long form here. Compared to the partial drafts I have lying around in the Wok working directory, often not even committed to the repository, I count this as significant personal progress. And while I'm not entirely happy with my reliance on external services for this (I still remain a fan of POSSE over PESOS), I'd rather take this over not writing at all.

Of course, this has just made finding a replacement for ikiwiki even harder, as now having an integrated (preferably federated) option for microblogging becomes a strong preferential feature —even more so for something that would allow assembling long-form content from the microblogging snippets in non-thread form while still preserving snippet addressing, and ideally commenting.

It's definitely something I have to think about some more.