Expand the character limit for posts (toots) in our mastodon instance

Hi all, I posted a link to this from the social.coop admin account. For my part, I've grown accustomed to the limit and appreciate it for the reasons stated above. I wonder if the solution doesn't lie in adding tools/platforms, so that social.coop members also get a writefreely account (like we currently get a Meet.Coop account). Social.coop already is a bundle of platforms (Mastodon, Matrix, Git, Open Collective, Loomio...). I'd also like to see us collaborate on this with existing efforts like Co-op Cloud or MayFirst. (But I don't oppose the proposal.)

I follow some people who use long posts occasionally and actually prefer reading them instead of a fragmented chain. I don't miss the large amounts of comment threads on Twitter at all. I also think that having to be brief sometimes leads to cutting out things that might better explain the context of what you are trying to say, which can lead to less constructive discussion.

From an admin perspective is it really the case that you need to modify the Mastodon source to get longer posts, and that it's not an explicit config change?

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12265

While I'm sure it could be scripted in the deploy/update this might not be the best from a maintenance perspective.

that's a good point, when I joined on the tech team we had various customizations to mastodon, and we ripped them out as it is indeed hard to maintain... we only just manage to have it up and running at all :)

... there are indeed multiple places where it is hardcoded :/

• app/javascript/mastodon/features/compose/components/compose_form.js (twice, and also probably requires doing a webpack rebuild of the assets)

• app/validators/status_length_validator.rb (once)

Eugen (main developer of mastodon) seems very unsupportive of making this configurable... which is sad.

So, important thing, as well as deciding if we want to increase it, have to work out if we can increase it. This in practise means something for tech team to agree to make changes and document/support them. That's not me, and it's not something I'm personally up for.

Ping @Flancian ? ... I don't know how/where tech team is at now tbh...

Alternatively, switching to a fork that makes it configurable is another option, but that also needs capacity and interest within the tech team. It ain't me babe ;)

@Eduardo Mercovich, thank you for proposing this for us to discuss.

While I can sympathize with wanting a longer field, given the experiences with Twitter's original character maximum, and I understand that by expanding it to 5,000, it would still give people the freedom to be more expressive, my concern is that of those who do utilize this much space, it could wind up crowding out nearly most or all of a screen depending on window resolutions and devices.

It may actually be quite an unpleasant experience to regularly see half a screen or a full screen of one or two people's thoughts, while so many others who are more economical wind up being squeezed out.

If we're to have the ability to post in 5,000 characters at a time, I think it would be best to have a feature so that users could filter messages by a user-defined size (say, let them have the ability to hide messages longer than 1,000 or 3,000 characters or any other number), but I think it's very likely that many users would want to filter out such large messages, and those who were interested in writing so much, might find an inverse proportional interest from readers: the more walls of text one writes, the more messages of theirs that will be hidden.

Given this, perhaps we can negotiate a size in between the current one and the proposed one that is an increase by tenfold?

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The text above from the at sign to the question mark inclusive is 1,357 characters. Should we make this space one in which people can post more than 3 times that in one toot?

Beyond that though, where social.coop is on other servers' federated timeline, how nice would it be for us to send walls of text there? Might it result in server admins block listing us? I don't know the answers to these questions. So, perhaps some of us should first experiment by spending more time on these servers with 5,000 character maximums and reflecting on how we feel about the experience.

But thank you for bringing this request to us, brother. I'm sure we can figure something out.

mastodon will hide text beyond ~500 chars, with a "read more" link or something like that. the timeline won't get filled with walls of text.... in theory at least, I can't find any long toots to check it...

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/8205#issuecomment-416071326 is where that feature got added...

I think it would be best to have a feature so that users could filter messages by a user-defined size

we do not have the capacity to add custom features to mastodon, you could see if people have requested it before, and if not open the topic yourself, in the github issues for the mastodon project --> https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues - I suspect the "read more" folding is sufficient for most people though...

I wonder if a 1000 char limit would be a good trial.... and see how that goes down?

1,000 characters together with the ‘Read more’ foldover feels to me like a reasonable place to be. Although, having the character count go red when 500 words is reached would also be helpful?

At the same time, it could be good to have a Writeas account too. For blogging that is not ‘micro’ aka 1,000 words.

I feel like our scarce WG resources would be better spent elsewhere, such as smoothing out the sign up flow.

Mastodon isn't a blog, it is not intended for long-form content. Folks are welcome to toot links to their longer-form content elsewhere, and many of us already do.

For the occasional longer disquisition, folks figured out threads long ago.

As others have mentioned the micro-blogging format keeps things concise.

I would lean into an existing solution such as the Hometown fork of mastodon, it seems well maintained (up to date), and comes with the discussed custom features, as well as a few others:

• Custom max toot characters to change the default 500 characters limits imposed by Mastodon

• In-line reading of full articles behind a cut for length

• Local only posting (aka posts that never federate)

• Exclusive lists which let you follow accounts without them clogging up your home timeline

• Themes of a pastel variety!

Personally, I would favour switching to Hometown, but leaving the max toot length as-is or a small increase, while the in-inline reading of Articles (from Writefreely, Plume, WordPress) would be a good compromise for most users.

+1

My opinion, for what it's worth, is that even if the 500 character limit is increased it's very unlikely there will be many posts using more than 500 characters. To my mind, arguments from positions such as "I've grown used to the limit" don't hold much water. It is unlikely to affect you, as you can carry on as you were.

Personally, I'm ambivalent. I have a blog and am happy making threads for things longer than 500 characters, but I see this proposal as "good enough for now, and safe enough to try". So it's a vote in favour from me 🙂