… there is a much bigger opportunity for the fediverse by focusing on long-form content and forums, than on recreating a microblogging Twitter-like experience. Selling the same product that people already know, but now with less of their social graph, is always going to be an incredible hard task. Exploring how new products can be build that stimulate thoughtful conversation is a much more interesting direction to me.

— Laurens Hofs on Last Week in the Fediverse

Yes to this. So far, Mastodon and Bluesky have been Twitter, but without most of the people you followed on Twitter. Threads is trying to become Twitter like you used to know it, but deemphasizing news and politics and bigger. X is Twitter with more Nazis and porn. Tumblr is Tumblr, and seems to have lost interest in joining the fediverse. Facebook is Facebook, and Meta seems to have lost interest in it.

If the fediverse is going to catch on, it needs to become something more than recapitulating the past. I don’t know whether long-form content and forums are the answer, but they’re at least different than Twitter-that-was.

I personally chafe at the 300-character limit of Bluesky and the micro.blog timeline, and the 500-character limit of Mastodon. My posts are often untitled and longer than 500 characters and I dislike the way they get arbitrarily lopped in the middle on microblogging platforms.

I feel like we’re halfway to a new, healthier and more open form of social media (something like Dave Winer’s vision of textcasting) and I want us to move faster. Sometimes it seems like we’re stalled.