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

I wanted to see what it looks like when mastodon has long texts, but struggled to find an example (I found posts of 1000 chars that were not folding... so I'm not sure the exact mechanism), ... but someone finally shared one with me that did.

If you put @[email protected] in the searchbox in mastodon, then scroll down their public feed, you should see some "Read more" links...

And, in case it got lost, it's not clear we actually have technical capacity to make this change (see my comment here --> https://www.loomio.org/d/0bCHvrTj/expand-the-character-limit-for-posts-toots-in-our-mastodon-instance/15 )

If there was tech team capacity, switching to hometown fork would seem a good idea to me, as suggested by @Django - as maintaining our own patches for increasing post length is not pretty imho.

@Nick Sellen thanks for finding an example. In my own experience I find the Read More links work well to keep the flow of the timeline going, without burdening it with the full text of the post. And we get this already on our own instance, which is nice. The question is do others want to be able compose posts like this, and it seems like the answer is (for some) yes.

But I totally agree that given our technical capacity we should avoid maintaining our own patches. I wonder if maybe we should set up a meeting to talk about Hometown sometime? Or has that already happened before and I missed it?

In theory I would vote yes for this because:

• I find the character limit too short.

• I don't like that it is a technically-defined limit to communication, and a pretty arbitrary one at that. If there's some expectation of optimal message length, I would prefer that to be socially determined, not technologically enforced...

But given it doesn't seem to just be a simple config option, it doesn't bother me enough in practice for it to warrant the technical changes needed.

I don't have a strong opinion about character limits, but the killer feature of the Hometown fork in my humble opinion is user-configurable expiring posts (e.g, you can set all of your own posts to delete after one year). So yes, I also think we should consider the switch so that we can take advantage of all of Hometown's cool features. But I'm new to social.coop, and don't have a deep understanding of the culture around undertaking big projects like this, so I want to be clear that I'm also totally fine with the status quo if it makes life easier for folks.

Dear all.

I'm sorry I had a couple offline days but after seeing what was flowing and being the OP, I preferred to let others express themselves without intervening. Now that it seems that the incoming opinions and views are slowing, I made a thematic analysis on the results for all folxs to interpret.

Each response was tagged with 1 or more synthesis; a new tag if needed and reusing existing tags when possible. The tags were counted per reply and in total and with this information a co-ocurrence matrix was created to visualize which tag appeared with which other one/s (if any).

Both axes of the matrix are the same, except that the vertical were grouped by a big category created from the results (yes, condition, maybe, proposal, no) and the horizontal had the original order. You may observe that the total on the last right column is not the sum of the row because if a tag A appears in 1 answer with other 3 B, C and D, that will sum 4 (A, AB, AC, AD).

Of course since I may be biased even if I'm trying not to be, I am not interpreting anything, just sharing here:

• the tag co-ocurrence matrix as it is for you all to interpret it (both png and pdf versions) and

• the whole dataset (the tagged responses up to now, as an .org plain text file).

Of course, I'll be happy to explain anything that may be needed.

I hope this helps us to move on forward. :)

Warmest regards...

Also, I'd like to thank you all for the warm welcome and great participation. :)

Very nice! Thanks for the tabulating work, @Eduardo Mercovich !

Thanks Bob, it's my pleasure.

I use free tools for this (and almost all) kind of work that I'll happily share if anyone is on these things. :)

Didn't make the time to read through all this. Notice that here on Loomio, it's easy to be verbose and long-winded. I can SO easily get extra verbose myself. (I could have just left out that point and this parenthetical and my message would be okay still!)

If we remove the char limit, people are going to likely get excessively-long posts from me.

My wish would be to have features Mastodon probably doesn't offer yet.

• Individuals setting our own char-limits!

• Short tldr summaries with expand options for longer beyond-limit content

• The ability to opt (be prompted) when passing a limit

• Formal recognition of multi-toot posts as a set (not just casually marked as replies with manually labeled numbers)

And so on (perhaps some of these are already requested or can be requested for the software upstream). I think if people want to post long messages, that might be best done in a different place and then link to the longer post in a toot.

Hi Aaron.

A few of your wishes are present in Hometown (https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown) along with some more features:

• Custom max toot characters

• Local only posting

• Reading more content types

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

• Better list (feeds) management

• Better accessibility defaults

• And as it's maintainer says, "Hometown is still 99.999% Mastodon".

Migrating from Mastodon to Hometown is a possibility that appeared in various responses, understanding that it depends on having the time and knowledge in the tech team to make the change. The migration seems very similar to updating Mastodon itself (seehttps://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/wiki/Initial-migration).

Maybe this information could be useful for us all to decide what to do next. :)

Best...