I’ve been privately DMing some other kbin users for a while now and I’ve run into a recurring issue: once the conversations and responses get lengthy, there’s a hard length cap in terms of character count. Namely 5000 characters. Some of our messages end up around 20k characters in length, trying to quote and address each part of the previous message.
What ends up happening is that we then break the message into “parts”. Message 5k of the message in part one, then another 5k characters in part 2, then another in part 3, etc. the message in the dm then shows up in reverse order, making it a little bit of a pain to read.
I understand the need for a length limit in public threads and in public comments; since such things are often brief (and longer threads can simply link to something like pastebin). However, in a DM you can’t really rely on 3rd party site to host the text.
Is this a limit/constraint with activitypub itself? or is it uniquely kbin? If the former, could we get kbin to auto-split dm messages into multiple parts, then restitch them inside the kbin dm ui?
If you’ve ever had a long-form discussion on twitter, or wanted to say something more than 280 characters, you know how it is. you get (1/6), (2/6), (3/6), etc. super annoying. And for a private chat the limit seems arbitrary.
Have you considered exchanging emails addresses with these people?
One person I’m speaking with I just gave them my discord info lol. email is, no offense, kinda terrible. there’s no markdown support at all which makes the usual conversation style kinda difficult (block quoting a part of the message, and replying to it).
I also check email far less frequently than I check kbin lol.
How’d you think the “>” convention for quoting in markdown comes from? It’s from email back in the day before MS and gang made top quoting the norm.
I’m now curious though. How long was Reddit’s DM limit? I remember exchanging some really long ones with people back in the day.
I’d agree that it’s easier to check from one place instead of multiple. Plus not everyone will want to give out their email addresses.
I don’t actually ever remember hitting a DM length limit on reddit. I do know that reddit had thread/comment length limits which I hit all the damn time haha. But I don’t recall ever hitting it in dms.
As for the > convention… sure. I don’t doubt that maybe some older email clients worked like that. but modern day you can’t really write in markdown style. and I can’t seem to figure out how to get gmail doing block quotes lol.
but yeah I’m not really an email person. I prefer reddit-style markdown forums for asynchronous discussions, and live instant message like discord for live chats. email does neither of those, but it’s just used because it’s ubiquitous unfortunately. email is… actually really bad. every thing requires it to signup, and then just spams your inbox. no one actually uses it to discuss/chat (and it’s honestly terrible for that). so it ends up just being the way you verify your account after signup which is a dumb system. for password recovery I guess it works. it’s also nice to get purchase confirmations in email. but other than that it’s ehh.
tbh web as a whole really needs a rethink.
Yea, ok, that’s my experience in Reddit too, never had an issue with longer DMs.
Using > was the convention, and I kinda got annoyed when topposting became a thing. I still use email for work and boy it’s not my favourite. In Gmail you can still do a quote, I think it’s Ctrl-Shift-9.
Email (and Usenet) used to be the centre for my online communications. It’s remarkable how the world has moved on from that.
