Honest question from a Mastodon user. Is it truly that large? Most of the nodes I'm on remind me of 2006 Twitter, shouting in the dark.

As opposed to current Twitter, throwing a message-in-a-bottle into a landfill of messages in bottles.

Reddit has 330 MAU. All of Mastodon is somewhat over 2 million users, with an unknown set of nonregistered viewers / readers.

It's not a tiny userbase, but it's quite small by present social media standards.

http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/general

https://www.redditinc.com/press

http://redditmetrics.com/

Doesn't Mastodon have a character limit? How can you even start changing someone's view with just 500 characters?

Mastodon has a character limit, but the protocol underlying Mastodon (ActivityPub: http://activitypub.rocks/) doesn't.

Adding a character limit was just a design decision on the part of the Mastodon developers to make their app more Twitter-like. There's nothing stopping others from building apps that don't have a character limit, and they would be able to federate with Mastodon and other AP-enabled apps just fine.

There’s patches floating around to change the limit on Masto, too. My instance limits you to 7777, and requires you to put it behind a CW if it’s more than 777. I know of an instance that gives you unlimited text if it’s behind a CW.

What's a CW?

Content warning. Like those spoiler tags in some forums that let you hide or show the actual spoiler.

Why require a CW for that? Most clients should auto-collapse long messages now. (Mastodon's web client does).