one quarter of @staff! i make the website look good and/or bad depending on your personal taste
Cohost's (and Masto's, and pretty much anywhere) more open approach to writing means you can't easily make your post funnier by deliberately crashing against the arbitrary character limit.
Don’t overlook other options, like gradually shrinking text size to indicate trailing off while you blah blah blah
i wanna make up a technical excuse for why it’s 140 (e.g. twitter’s limit was, i think, for SMS reasons)
yep. 140 characters + the @ and a 14 char max name for replies comes out to the 155 char sms limit
The title limit is 140 because older versions of Cohost would crosspost just the title (without the post body) to Twitter even though the limit on Twitter had already been lifted to 280 (@staff hadn't gotten the memo)
However, people would frequently chost title-free chosts and Twitter doesn't permit blank tweets, so every time someone chosted without a title the cross-posting message queue would crash and a Cohost staff member would have to restart the message queue. Since the staff was OOO on weekends this led to the cross-posting feature frequently being broken on Saturday and Sunday.
I noticed the suspiciously familiar character limit on the headlines last night and it made me smile.
there should probably be some special formatting specifically for title-only chosts to encourage people to do them more so that we get more good shitposts here
