this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2026
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Microblog Memes
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A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
- Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
- Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
- You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
- Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
- Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
- Absolutely no NSFL content.
- Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
- No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.
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Technically focal length doesn't matter directly, only indirectly, because the phenomenon is almost entirely defined by the distance from the camera and the subject. If you have a 50mm lens and take the photo as far away as the 200mm lens, the person will look roughly the same when cropped down to the same apparent size (minus the loss of resolution from cropping and a smaller effective sensor size).
If you slap on a 200mm lens on a camera within 2 meters of your subject, though, you might not be able to focus, and if you can you wouldn't be able to fit their entire face in frame.
But that also means our eyes, with our fixed focal lengths, can experience the same thing, by just moving closer or further away from a subject. Our visual cortex automatically adjusts a lot of things, but get up close and see someone's ears or hair shrink in relative terms compared to their nose, or get far away and see their nose get back to a normal ratio to their eyes or ears.
Side note, this is a big reason why I don't care for selfies. I don't like the distortion.
This is true, but not very helpful: the comparison is about varying focal length while keeping the share of the image occupied by the subject the same.
Yes, but I bring it up for the specific example of using our own eyes to achieve this effect, rather than relying on a camera. We don't have a choice to change the focal length of our own eyes, or even crop the image, but the effect is still there.