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.