Proposal to revisit extending the character limit for posts

I'm only commenting on my own personal use-case for a longer character limit because I've genuinely no idea how it'll affect the community at large, or other people's experiences.

@benjamin melançon This would be sweet, noted!

Great job summarizing and sharing the outcome, Evan! Thank you for your work here shepherding this experiment forward.

Many of my comments on Mastodon are technical answers that are difficult to fit in the limit, and breaking it into multiple replies is less good. The posts I originate can usually be edited to fit but when replying to questions that require a lot of detail in the answer it's more difficult.

Social Stuff

I respect other people's desire to keep their own posts short, but I think that opposing increasing the character limit because they have grown used to the 500 character limit as some optimum of brevity veers pretty strongly into "you shouldn't want what you want" territory for me. Long posts clogging the feed is a UI problem that other forks have solved (and we should as well, see below) and is an entirely separate issue from whether we should raise the character limit. as others have noted in thread, reading is optional, so by longposting you aren't 'demanding other people's attention' any more than you are when you are regularposting. If techwg says they can maintain the fork, then i don't see any reason not to raise the character limit - let ppl express themselves how they want. It is deeply patronizing to me to say things like 'having a low character count is what makes creativity/culture/etc work' - don't impose your beliefs about what 'works' or not on me or anyone else, imposing those beliefs on others is contrary to the cooperative spirit to me. If you like brevity, cool. If you want to longpost, also cool. I think it's an especially pretty hard sell to suggest there is some qualitative culture-breaking threshold somewhere between 500 and 1000 characters.

Technical stuff

I run an instance with a 10k character limit that's a fork of glitch, and whenever I use social.coop I am both astonished that base masto a) doesn't expose this parameter more easily, but more importantly b) doesn't have a "collapse long posts" feature.

So, eg. here's what my profile with a pinned long post looks like on our glitch fork:

and here's what it looks like on social.coop

so there is a "read more" button that then takes you to the full post, which works for a post within a feed, but since masto uses the [same component in notifications](https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/616789454707be00b334070646491b5e028d3be6/app/javascript/mastodon/features/notifications/components/notification.jsx#L208) then any long post makes your notifications unusable. I see above that the collapse behavior has been noted, but it's a) not enough of a collapse, it would still totally break your notifs and b) the UI is awkward, taking you to another page rather than expand/collapse in-page.

like this is generally true of base masto (notifications are unusable), but is an especially important thing if we have longposts. I think most of the concerns above about long posts are mostly UI concerns - base masto handles them terribly, and so collapsing long posts is like a de-facto "long" c/w where one can see a preview and expand the longer post if they want to see it.

(imo we should be running glitch anyway, but just wanted to put this on ppls radar as another concern)

@jonny twg isn't opposed to glitch, just there hasn't been enough user initiative... and by that I mean we should run an alpha, have a proposal, ect. I think that at 1000 characters, the see more concern isn't particularly pressing — at least not more so than it already was. While I don't feel strongly either way on glitch, I'm willing to drive this once the character limit discussion concludes (and also I agree that "should we run a fork" is (or at least should be) a separate question to "should we change the limit".

When we have that conversation your opinions as an instance admin on glitch will be immensely valuable, stay tuned (or start the conversation yourself!)

But yeah, I agree that at least from a reading perspective not much will change unless you spend a lot of time in the local timeline and/or have a feed of mostly social.coop users, and I still don't think the change will be huge.

@Evan Boehs maintaining a glitch instance is almost identical to maintaining a base masto instance, and we maintain a fork of glitch which is similarly nbd. we merge upstream every few weeks and it is basically never an issue. having the freedom to hack on the instance software is extremely worth it since base masto is broken in a bunch of ways

@jonny

I actually think the social.coop screenshot looks a ton better.

@Dynamic It really doesn't when you see a hundred of those in a row in your notifications, trust me. like yes on its own it looks better but that wasn't the point of my post

@jonny

Do they automatically all expand when you try to read a thread? Because imagining trying to read a thread made of these things just brings on psychosomatic eye strain for me.

@Dynamic it's exactly the same React component in notifs as when displayed normally, so yes without having the narrow collapse it does render like that for every single interaction on a post. this is one of the first things you notice during live usage of masto with longer character counts that's not immediately obvious from the base UX.

it's also true for 'edge case' masto posts. so eg. here's a screenshot of what it looks like when i post a 1px wide, 100000px tall image and then like it from another account. :

so that actually goes on for an unbelievably long scroll distance.

point being that you need the narrow collapse as the default view to make masto sorta usable with longer posts. i would expect that most people in this thread who are talking about short posts being the soul of brevity and how longer posts get in the way/should be on a different medium have just never experienced an instance that handles long posts well.

@jonny

I don't know if you actually answered my question, but it sounds like my guess is correct that this "solution" would make it even harder to read long threads made up of long posts. I'm on the brink of changing my vote to "disagree", just on the basis that allowing longer posts might open us up to this kind of interface shift.

In short, I like things the way they are, including when I see long posts from instances that allow it. I think it's fine for different people to have different use cases with some making longer posts and some making shorter posts and people deciding who to follow accordingly, but I don't want to lose the current interface experience.

@Dynamic sorry if i'm being unclear - i'm saying that the notification problem is the much more impactful one with longer character counts (the proposal at hand) than the reading problem. expanding the posts in a thread is not a big deal at all - unlike in base masto, in glitch the expansions happens in place rather than going to a different page. this makes it actually more possible to read a thread, since otherwise it's impossible to get a sense of the branching structure with the current interface, abbreviating the posts allows you to get a sense of the whole thread much more easily. adding a 'toggle all' button would be trivial, we've never had someone ask for it bc the benefits are pretty obvious once you start using it in context instead of seeing it in a single screenshot.

in glitch this setting is optional and configurable - you can turn off collapsing posts altogether and set the threshold for collapsing. i really think the answer is 'working on the UI' rather than trying to freeze it in place. none of this is necessarily relevant to the question at hand though, i was just trying to raise the notification ui problem as a potentially unforeseen one for anyone who hasn't been on an instance with raised character counts.

since most 'no' votes are talking about how hard it is to read long posts when scrolling in one way or another, i also wanted to say that forks that deal with longer character counts have figured out ways of dealing with them, and the example of the long image shows that those features would benefit base masto even without expanding the character counts - aka that the problems are orthogonal, and difficulty of scrolling through long posts is not a reason to vote no.

@jonny

What I needed to hear was that collapse could be turned off, so thank you for that.

I'll try to keep my relief at that separate from my extreme irritation at what you wrote here,

this makes it actually more possible to read a thread, since otherwise it's impossible to get a sense of the branching structure with the current interface, abbreviating the posts allows you to get a sense of the whole thread much more easily. adding a 'toggle all' button would be trivial, we've never had someone ask for it bc the benefits are pretty obvious once you start using it in context instead of seeing it in a single screenshot.

I've been talking about slightly unpleasant experiences that I've had on Mastodon as it currently is, which I know would be more unpleasant if the longer posts got shortened further. Telling me that I will be able to read long threads better if the individual posts are abbreviated when my lived experience is that it doesn't do that at all is incredibly off-putting.

@jonny

"so by longposting you aren't 'demanding other people's attention' any more than you are when you are regular posting"

Hard agree. In fact I'd go further. When it comes to replying to people rather than being OP, I inwardly cringe every time I end up posting multiple times to get my point across. Putting one long reply into someone's notifications feels like way less of a demand than 2-3 short ones.

@dash82 This is very relevant to me.

I don't have strong feelings about where we set the word limit, but I do have strong feelings against efforts to "aesthetically" shorten longer posts in ways that break up the readability of long threads.

The only real concern I had with longer limits was that I've found it unpleasant trying to read long threads where the individual posts were long enough to trigger the "Read more" link, making it impossible to view the entire thread at once. The Glitch style shortener that Jonny posted a screenshot of looks even worse in my opinion.

As expressed elsewhere: a larger limit means, to me, more freedom for our users; people who don't like it can probably ignore the feature with minimal disruption. Strong yes from me to this experiment!

♡Dear @Evan Boehs

Thanks a lot for the clear explanation and results. :D

As a researcher I'd love to help with the evaluation (these 3 questions "(How) has this changed the way you interacted with Mastodon", "(How) has this changed the culture at social coop" and "If you noticed changes, are you happy with them?"), but this doesn't need to be done now. :)

Thanks @Evan Boehs, this was a great process overall!

I just spent 10 mins hacking sentences over and over to get my 700 chars for a toot into 500, and found myself wondering what the status of this was? It says above there should have been a review by June 13, but I didn't see any mention of it in the recent minutes.

This isn't intended to be pushy – I realise there's multiple steps to this and it's not urgent. But the discussion we all invested in here seemed like a promising area of community democracy, so was just curious to learn what, if anything, is holding things up.

@nicw I'd been wondering this as well. From what I've seen on "social.coop tech chat" on Matrix, it looks like people from the TWG group were trying to persuade the Mastodon team to add a config setting for message length, but the Mastodon team isn't willing to do it.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/30091#issuecomment-2241565907

@Nic To follow up a little more the TWG is standing up an alpha instance to provide a sandbox for testing (do backups work?) and other development, including forking the Mastodon. Forking codebases has a lot of downsides (higher maintenance to move over the security and other updates manually). No promises here. But standing up that alpha instance is a first step.

Thanks @Brian Vaughan & @Kathe TB – I didn't get a notification of a reply so just saw this now. That is disappointing, I hadn't realised a) Mastodon prevents people changing the limit; and b) they rejected a sensible PR on the issue. That is their prerogative - I can imagine their internal debate might be as divided as ours is!

But it does create an impasse. Reminds me why Mastodon desperately needs an extension ecosystem (like PeerTube has), to avoid these functional bottlenecks around the core team's preferences. I agree maintaining our own fork would be too much, and it looks like HomeTown hasn't been updated in 8 months. Misskey gives big lolicon vibes (or at least their home page does). Pleorama seems active but looks clunky. The Pleorama fork Soapbox looks lovely and has quote posts but has some history (is a 'hostile fork'), Akkoma looks less lovely but doesn't have the same fallout - tho also seems critical of Pleorama. Mangane is a fork of Akkoma, and now I'm lost down a rabbit hole, which somehow has Gab in it's history. And here's an even bigger list of Misskey forks. OK, I see why this has stalled! That said there are some nice looking alternatives to Mastodon out there, tho the politics & choice is a bit dizzying.

@Nic

Any thoughts on Glitch?

@Dynamic as in glitch.com/fediverse? I didn't clock it had feddy links til know tbh! I've followed Jenn and Potch - I've not used it much but based on those two being involved it must be good…

@Nic

I'm... not sure, actually. I can't tell whether that's the same thing as https://github.com/glitch-soc or not. I'm on a Mastodon instance that uses the glitch-soc fork, but I've also seen people sing the praises of Glitch, and I assumed it was the same thing, but I feel like maybe I misunderstood.

Ahoy there! The TWG has been (slowly) prioritizing testing this setting in a development instance; we needed one to be able to experiment responsibly with this and other patches we might want to maintain and apply.

Thank you for your patience; we have acquired a new test server and are in the process of bringing up alpha.social.coop as an independent space to experiment with.

Adding my support for increasing length. The longer the better.

Although sometimes I appreciate the value of being forced to write in a concise way, I more strongly value the flexibility to be able to write more long-form without having to find a separate blog platform

Hi @Flancian !

I can only be grateful to you and all the TWG that are finally advancing on this. As @Imbolc and others (upwards) I would be happy to have al many as we can. But with the 1500 that we agreed I am much much happier than now. ;)

If you want to go fast, go alone.

If you want to go far, let's go together.

-- Anonymous African proverb.