Expand the character limit for posts (toots) in our mastodon instance
Eduardo Mercovich
Public
Seen by 166
Dear fellow Cooperators.
We currently have the default 500 char per post limit in our mastodon instance. At least for me (and a few others already expressed the same) this lenght is often quite limited. In other instances this is 10x, that is, 5000 chars per post.
In order to better understand if this is an issue with other people there was a poll limited to Social Coop members (https://social.coop/web/statuses/108951796274042404). However, only 3 people answered.
So if it is not a problem with storage, administration, moderation, costs or something related and/or relevant, I'd propose to increase the char limit to 5000.
What do you all think?
Thanks a lot for your time and attention... :)
Jonobie Ford Mon 14 Nov 2022 5:25PM
I'm on another instance with a longer character limit, and I honestly don't like it nearly as much. People get rambly. So my preference is to stay shorter.
Flancian Fri 25 Nov 2022 9:02PM
I feel that ideally we'd default to a good-enough, well-known value (it might be 500, it might be 512 ;)) but let users redefine the default according to their preferences.
Mastodon doesn't support this overriding yet I think, but we could explore a patch or workaround -- that might come with maintenance or implementation cost, though. Other Fediverse software might support this now, or in the future; we could check.
If we can't provide overrides soon, I'd rather we upped the limit by default and let people self-limit. It is the safest default in the sense that it maximizes freedom at no clear (but I'd say not huge) cost.
Note in particular that if the UI limited the number of characters shown by default to 500, there would be no extra cost to the reader if they want to scroll past.
Eduardo Mercovich Tue 29 Nov 2022 1:52PM
What happened with the idea of trying Hometown that was talked before? Is that still on track once we have the new server? :)
@Literally@social.coop Sat 26 Nov 2022 6:19PM
Fedibird https://github.com/fedibird/mastodon offers more features and is used in a pretty big instance, it might be interesting to check it out or create a sister instance. this would also be in line with the "budding" idea of spinning out more cooperative instances.
Kaitlin Wed 10 Apr 2024 9:06PM
I would be much more interested in checking my feed if there were a higher character limit.
Dave V. ND9JR · Sun 13 Nov 2022 6:18PM
I'm on another instance that has a 2222 character limit. It's nice sometimes to go beyond 500 characters, though I think 5000 is a bit too much, and I'm glad I'm not the only one that's brought up a limit in between those two because for some time the discussion seemed to be either stay at 500 or go up to 5000 when there are other options available.
I'd be for something between 1000 and 1500 myself. In any case I'd love to see us either upgrade our version of Mastodon or switch to a fork with features that will benefit us.