In the department of Problems Particular to Me With Solutions Only I Really Want, we have the POSSE Poster:

1. Drop images and write captions. Auto-uploaded to my SmugMug sharing album.
2. Start typing a post targeted for Bluesky and Mastodon.
3. If the post goes longer than 300 characters …

… get an option to keep typing.

The 300-char version goes to Bluesky only, the longer version (with my hachyderm.io’s much larger 2,263-character limit) appears on Mastodon, and the Bluesky post gets a link to that version.

So if I’m careful to have a pithy lead for Bluesky, I can have longer-form posts on Mastodon – 400 to 450 words.

There’s an “actual longform” element that’s next, but I’m asking myself how to manage that. I don’t want to write longform posts in a webform, and I already have some local infra for ingesting Markdown from a worker, so I’m busy sketching how I want the CMS to work with all this, whether I need to change CMSes, etc.

At the end of the day, the longer form things need to be some kind of Markdown somewhere in version control. Just not sure how to manage it yet.

I always liked micro.blog’s “tip over into a longform post” mechanic, but the implementation never quite worked for me because micro.blog is solving for different use cases and a diversity of platforms I don’t have to, and that make it feel a little mysterious sometimes.