Consumers are a sleeping giant; an untapped power to demand better from tech giants, if only we had the discipline to boycott unacceptible options. If only we had the constitution to refuse injustices & prioritize the greater good above selfish short-term desires.
"If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, [...] if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, [they] would have no need to conspire. They need only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it."
—George Orwell, 1984
Side note:
I hate how I had to butcher that quote to fit. Yet again 500 characters is proven to be a pittance unfit for serious prose.
@Coffee one option would be to render the text as a PNG using #ImageMagick and post that (but it would have inconvenienced me since I use a non-GUI client). I think some nodes have bigger limits.
@resist1984 #Fedilab can do that, but I thought splitting it up would harm the flow. Anyway, I hope you have access to the image description from your non-GUI client. There are 1500 characters available for an image description, which makes the 500 limit on the main text even dumber.
@Coffee i didn't know there was an image description feature. Is there a field for that in the GUI web client? The #bitlbee-mastodon plugin does not show the description automatically, but if I use the "info" command to dump all status details, it appears there, but it's truncated because it exceeds IRC line limits & the plugin isn't designed to break one field into multiple lines.
@Coffee I wonder if @kensanata is aware of this.. it could be the same bug as this one: https://alexschroeder.ch/software/Post_confirmation_truncated I'm not sure if it's an IRC limit or a limit of the plugin.
@resist1984 I forget how exactly Bitlbee works, but IIRC it acts like a local IRC server, so in theory line length could be unlimited.
Looks like Bitlbee truncates to 512 bytes as per the RFC, to avoid client issues. It would be nice if it would split messages rather than truncate them.
@resist1984 @Coffee there is. Even with an OCR feature. I just tried that OCR, but at least for me it didn't work. Maybe I've blocked something essential for it – it just froze. Luckily, clicking outside aborted it…
@resist1984 After you've uploaded an image, it will be displayed with some floating buttons overlaid. If you click "edit" you can add a description and change what part of the image gets cropped. Fedilab also supports adding image descriptions.
@resist1984 hmmm i should look into a non-GUI client. Incidentally, if you ever do read 1984 maybe you'll freak out at the realization that telescreens are about to be a think and everyone is welcoming them for some reason.
@resist1984 you're on the right track, though – you just forgot the final step: ALT. Add an image description. You'll be surprised how much text is allowed for that (teaser: 1500 chars). And I bet your TUI client will show the ALT text of the image, won't it? @Coffee
@Coffee I wonder if it would be useful for a #Mastodon client would detect msg limits, and give you the option to either post in parts, or automatically do an imagemagick trick