Proposal to revisit extending the character limit for posts

@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.

Nothing happened .... I've just started a new thread for recommendations of where to move to :-(

 

From the "final results" comment:

"
We will extend the character limit to 1000 (soon)

There was a roughly 60%, 15%, 25% split between Agree, Abstain and Disagree. Agree recieved a majority. Arguments in favour of agree included the annoyance of dealing with threads & the difficulty of conversation with the limit. People who abstained noted that we already federate with servers using higher limits. Disagreers tended to value the process of revising their writing to fit under the limit, and argued that Mastodon is poorly equipped for longer posts.
"

But when you look at the actual figures:

The largest portion of the potential voters didn't care enough about this to vote either way.

As it is, the result from the active voters, the character limit should have been increased.

Can someone from the Tech Working Group please give an update about the timeline on implementing this decision? @Ammar @Calix @Flancian I think you are current members but please feel free to tag in whoever is tracking this, thanks!

@alexrodriguez3 I have been concerned that there's been such a long time since we had a vote on this, without an update on implementation.

@Alex Rodriguez I'm not officially a member of TWG yet (a prospective member maybe accurate), though this update from @Flancian seems to be accurate still (at the moment of writing)

https://www.loomio.com/d/C4HKmTOa/proposal-to-revisit-extending-the-character-limit-for-posts/109

@Alex Rodriguez @Brian Vaughan thank you for your interest on the topic, and sorry we're a bit delayed here! I've tried explaining further why we've been moving slow on this with this comment to the post by @Mitra Ardron: https://www.loomio.com/d/r4290m3X/recommendations-for-other-progressive-mastodon-hosts-without-tiny-character-limits-/14

With the influx of new people to the TWG I think we'll be able to unblock this sooner; if we don't and the community really needs the change, there is also the option of YOLOing a bit more (or 'rawdogging' it as I think people say nowadays?) and just apply the change straight in the production instance, but we've been trying to avoid this so far.

@Ammar - ok thanks, so if that's still the status - i.e. no change since April, so its unfortunate but I'm presuming social.coop doesn't have the resources (or hasn't prioritized this sufficiently) to make the change. From my perspective, while I love the idea of social.coop (and make a small donation each month) its not really worth being on Mastodon from here with the current character limit and thread nonsense when others have solved the problem.

So .... back to the question of which host, those of us who need longer limits to be worth posting, anyone can give a recommendation to move to ... :-(

Update, belatedly: alpha.social.coop is now up and ready to be used for testing this change!

The TWG would like to thank the community for your patience while we navigate this change. This test instance that is now available will let us hopefully apply this change with maximal safety and minimum downtime, while ensuring the additional cost of having to apply a patch to Mastodon (that the project declined to merge) on every update is not too high.

We hope to have further reports soon, during January-February.

And here we are, maybe sooner than expected for a change :)

https://alpha.social.coop/@admin/115946788972605027 is the first 1k post in the test instance. It seems our patching strategy is sound and we'll likely be able to try this same approach in production soon.

And this is done!

https://social.coop/@flancian/116013829667309196

Thank you all for your patience, and please report any issues with the new 1k character limit if you find them :)

@Flancian and all the TWG, thank you very much. :D
I can't believe a few characters can make so much of a difference... :))))