I took a quick look at blurt, the new WordPress short-form blogging theme available on WordPress.com.

It's a theme, just like Baseline is a theme. Themes can alter the behavior of WordPress in almost any way imaginable. It's still just a theme, so if Blurt is not using too much WordPress.com magic, it should be able to used on a self-hosted site.

The artificial 500-character limit is clunky. The compose box simply is disabled if there are too many characters. If you edit the post in the WordPress dashboard, when saved extra characters are silently dropped.

With WordLand I can post 600 characters, and they don't get cut off. If I try to edit that, the save fails. It's an early version, Blurt doesn't know how to handle posts coming from outside its UI.

I'm not sure why everyone thinks a character limit is a defining feature of social media. That should be up to the writer, not the platform. It should be a threshold, not a wall. micro.blog seems to handle this well (at 300 characters the UI show a title field you may choose to use or not).

All in all, it's a cute idea, and I look forward to see how it develops. (Sorry for the fart joke title.) (Actually I'm not sorry. 😃)