April 6, 2023

To stop or not to stop that is the question

When creating threads, Fedimeister automatically breaks long texts to fit into posts. The easiest way to do this would have been to just apply the cut at the space before hitting the 500 character limit (or whatever the instance uses). But that would have inevitably resulted in a lot of sentences being ripped apart. So, instead of spaces, the algorithm currently looks for the following stop symbols: . , ; : ? ! as safe break points.

I’m not quite happy with comma, collon and semicollon being used as break points. On one hand it is desirable to be able to chop really long sentences apart (we germans can and will build monstrosities), on the other it means that sentences still get ripped apart (albeit sensibly).

I could make this configurable, but that would result in one of those obscure config options, I’m trying to avoid. I’ll leave it as is for now. Maybe I’m obessing over a non issue here. Feel free to discuss under #fedimeister .