@feditips This was a good design decision for accessibility & usability. We do complain sometimes about Mastodon's support for #a11y, but there are many small decisions like this that demonstrate people did *want* to do the right think.

@feditips Can a link be more than 500 characters long?

@feditips what I really want to know, why is Mastodon so inconsistent about providing preview images for linked content? Sometimes I get them, sometimes not. It seems random.

@feditips i really missed this amazing tip

@feditips Link shortners are like face masks or Youtube or (general) blog moderation.

You're not going to convince entitled dolts, trolls & narcissists of your 5 trillion good reasons, among which include the fact that you have PRIORITIES in life.

#Security-minded (#Risk-mature) content creators & news outlets posting sensitive videos on Youtube GET IT. They have the NEXT thing to MOVE ON TO.

Not worth MY TIME convincing some narcissist who can google me of my motives🔴https://bit.ly/2FfU4Bn▼

@feditips Good information—thanks!

@feditips good information

@feditips awesome! I'm new to Mastodon and these posts are very helpful!

@feditips Nice! I notice that the CW counts towards the limit too, rather than having its own limit. I wonder about alt text on images?

@feditips great design

@feditips My random thought on this:

How did the decision land on using 23 characters of the limit for URLs?

Or for that matter, why does any standard emoji (not instance emojis) – like ⁉️ – eat TWO characters from the limit instead of just one?

These are the things that live rent-free in my brain, apparently.

@feditips this is very smart. I didn't know this

@feditips also #LinkShorteners are extremely susceptible to #LinkRot and are easy to abuse for #malware, #scams and other bad actions!

@feditips link shorteners aren't needed on the 'big micro-blogging' service for several years, as well. But so called social media managers and content creators still use them to generate some numbers (KPI, yeah!) about their online activities and justify their spent time with these services - all for the price of privacy. :-/

@feditips something tells me not all clients implement this.

@feditips why 23?

@feditips

Good to know. Thanks for that

@feditips, I hate link shortener, because of this I use an unshorten extension to avoid surprises.
https://timleland.com/link-unshorten-extension/ (Chromium)
Alternatively online
https://linkunshorten.com

@feditips Didn't know this! Super neat!

@feditips this is actually cool as hell!