That all makes sense.

But I think all of these design choices are somewhat arbitrary. That is, they’re all mostly independent of each other and can be mixed and matched pretty freely without the underlying data structures on the backend changing much or at all.

The point being that I think we’re still transitioning out of the big social era where the platform is a highly walled garden. Once social media becomes decentralised and federated and FOSS, a lot of these boundaries no longer exist or don’t need to exist. Both a tumblr like UI and the ordinary UI and a Twitter like UI could exist on top of a single mastodon server.

Also, interestingly, I think calckey, which has a char limit of 4000 has also made some design choices similar to tumblr’s, but maybe organically and independently so(?)