In the end, people have a choice of who they follow and who they don't. And with the fediverse, they have a choice of platform. If someone does not want to see over 500 characters, then they should not follow people who post over 500 characters. And there is even a block function, if they don't want to see their comments either.
Ideally, instead of content warnings, Mastodon should just collapse long posts and add a "read more" option. I thought it already did that, but if it doesn't, that feature should be added.
Mastodon users don't necessarily only react like this upon posts in their personal timelines.
@Witcraft (Hubzilla) I still think Mastodon was expected to be federated within but a walled garden to the outside, not connected to anything else in spite of using an existing protocol. So it didn't have to be compatible to anything else.Still, the moment the first Mastodon instance went online, Mastodon federated itself with GNU social, Friendica, Hubzilla, Pleroma... And even when it introduced ActivityPub, Hubzilla already had it.