A subscriber of my channel has brought to my attention that several series of my messages (namely albums of files, such as https://t.me/ReadMithgol/1019 and https://t.me/ReadMithgol/1024 for example) are excessively narrow (and perhaps unbearably so for many readers) in several different Telegram client applications on different devices: on PC, and on Android, and in the Web. The following three screenshots have been sent to me to illustrate the point:
Such narrowness (about 3〜5 words per line) is so clearly hostile to any relaxed reading that it could not, I believe, be chosen and implemented independently by several applications' developers. I think that it required some conscious decision of Telegram's designers to make such collections of captioned files intentionally uncomfortable for most readers and thus to push many potential authors of such messages off the platform — perhaps, to its sister site of Telegraph where much wider paragraphs of text were readily available and could be interleaved by uploaded illustrations of any kind: by static pictures, by animations, by video files.
Recently, however, it was announced (by Pavel Durov himself, no less; see https://t.me/durov/343 for details) that the latter option (media uploads on Telegraph) becomes disabled. Hence the future of Telegraph becomes cloudy to say the least; meanwhile the limit for the lengths of captions under files has been raised to 4096 characters for Telegram Premium users (since June 2024, if I recall correctly) and thus such series of such files with their much longer captions would make a good substitute for Telegraph paragraphs and illustations… but only would make if not for the damned narrowness.
Hence the suggestion: make captions under files much, much wider — ideally at least as wide as the regular messages — no matter how short are the filenames.
You no longer need that narrowness, do you?
Some plausible alternatives / workarounds:
➊ One may enlarge filenames artificially (perhaps by some gibberish) and then hope that a longer filename could act like a crutch (🩼) and help the caption in becoming somewhat wider. This feels silly because it clutters the filesystems (both for the author and for the readers who download the files) by the excessive gibberish that eventually leads to some problems (such as randomly finding such gibberish when you look for another file using a short substring of its filename). It also raises suspicions unnecessarily; after all, when you see a lot of noise in the filename (and even if, instead of some noise, it is something very regular such as a long line of “░░░░░…░”), the first thing you should immediately suspect is someone's attempt at hiding the filename's extension (by forcing the filename to be truncated) or something even more sinister. And, on the other hand, if such workaround ever becomes so increasingly commonplace in Telegram that it can no longer raise any such suspicion, then (as you may have already guessed) some very real attempts at such hiding would also become increasingly successful in Telegram.
➋ One may hope that Telegraph has a future and thus continue composing large pieces of text on that platform, though for now with hotlinked illustrations instead of uploaded. However, there are not many picture hosts with allowed hotlinking, and most die after a few years or at least disable new uploads (not unlike Telegraph itself), such as https://pomf.cat/ or https://web.archive.org/web/20220331070632/http://ipfs.stadja.net/upload/ for example.
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