Recommendations for other progressive Mastodon hosts without tiny character limits?

Hey Mitra, I think you might also get very helpful answers asking this question on Mastodon.

Also - do you (or anyone else) have a link to the earlier discussion about character limits? I also think 500 is too few, though I was just begrudgingly getting used to it.

@pjwsocial.coop https://www.loomio.com/d/C4HKmTOa/proposal-to-revisit-extending-the-character-limit-for-posts/82

Make a proposal!

I only microblog and never run into our 500 character limit, so I don’t really care if it’s higher.

We already voted to increase character limit to 1000 (https://www.loomio.com/d/C4HKmTOa/proposal-to-revisit-extending-the-character-limit-for-posts/82)

Far less than the 3000 but double the current limit, TWG hasn't gotten to implement the outcome of that vote yet though

Not sure this is fitting content for our decision-seeking platform, but well:

Everybody is free to blog, you can click one easily. If it all seems to overwhelming, Medium.com is user friendly. On social.coop we're microblogging. And in the spirit of POSSE, you can always share links to your longform on Fedi.

@Daniel Brandes Of course I have no problem with you or anyone else preferring a 500 character limit, and arguing and voting for it. But "On social.coop we're microblogging" is not a very fair or compelling argument. Social.coop is whatever we, the members of the coop, want it to be. And the distinction between a microblog and something else isn't an immutable fact of nature.

In any case, as @Ammar helpfully pointed out, this discussion has already been had and doubling the character limit is on its way, so I guess there isn't much more to add on the point for now.

Hi Mitra,

Why don't you just split what you are sqying into 500-character chunks?

AIUI, this limit came from the original SMS protocols used by Twitter to communicate.

( Yes, I do know that the original protocols were smaller, but the character-limits were extended as Twitter became more popular... )

From my perspective, I have not problems working within these limits, as those limitis were there when I started using Social.coop, but other people's experiences may be different.

----

Also, I hadn't seen that conversation about the character limits, but I've not been well recently, so I missed out on a lot of things taking place. I'll try to keep up. :D

@Billy Smith As a reader, I hate it when I have to read 10 posts from the same person (Cory Doctorow or example) because he can't post it in one with a "Read More". I don't want to unfollow him because half his posts are of interest to me. I don't want to inflict that on anyone else. If you want to restrict your posts to 500 characters so-be-it. Since at least my posts aren't for a local social.coop audience, but for a wider metaverse audience, I don't want to be stuck with a restriction that others don't have to live within when IMHO it restricts the ability to make cogent arguments - and was one of the reasons I think Twitter was such a cess-pit.

If social.coop doesn't want to change, or hasn't got/prioritised the resources to do so then I respect that decision, hence the post to ask if anyone knows another site that is still progressively minded but doesn't make its users work withing these limits.

I notice, with Irony, that we have to use Loomio to hold these discussions because our Mastodon itself wouldn't allow almost any of the posts in this thread.

@Mitra Ardron 

I didn't see Twitter as a cesspit. I was having some really interesting conversations there, but I was operating from a position of priviledge, ie. white, cis, male. so I was operating on easy mode.

Mastodon does not allow secure voting like Loomio.

@Billy Smith As you wish - I'm not trying to reopen the argument. Personally I think it was a cess pit, in large part because of the constraint to keep everything too short to make a meaningful argument - its a bit like the difference between political advertising on US versus in democracies, in the UK you can make an argument in 3 minutes but in the US a 30-second sound-bit is only long enough to say "my oppenent sucks". But the point is that many hosts in the Fediverse have figured this out, and upped the limit, and if social.coop (for resource or other reasons) can't make that change then I, and it sounds like others, would like to figure out where to move to.

@Mitra Ardron I see your point.

I'm sad that nearly 2 years later after we decided to increase the character limit, it's still not done. We should do better. I think I'll try joining TWG in order to push this one through when my schedule gets less busy.

Maybe try weirder.earth?

Thanks @Sieva I can't figure out how you tell what their character limit is, any idea?

I follow someone on that server, and their posts are often fairly long. After a quick search I found one with over 1000 characters. I could ask if you want, but you could probably email them and ask about that and whether they accept new members!

Hi @Mitra Ardron, thanks for bringing this to everyone's attention here. I've pinged the TWG on the other decision thread and hopefully that is resolved soon. Sorry I don't have recommendations for other instances with higher limits.

Hi all! Sorry for the relative lack of communication and lack of progress on this topic. I understand your frustration given that we have failed to enact the result of the vote so far. As the person maybe most responsible within the TWG for the delays here, let me tell you about some of the factors at play here as I/we see them (I'll try to speak for the TWG but I can only approximately do this; when in doubt, you can safely assume all blunders are mine :))

First, let me confess that I am personally frustrated (like many) because of the fact that Mastodon doesn't support adjusting this setting using their stock distribution and the project actively refuses PRs that would make it so that admins can easily adjust this setting. See https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/30091#issuecomment-2241565907 (on a PR by another member of the TWG) for my communicated position on this and the semi-response of the Mastodon project.

Second, in the last year and a half at times we were in a bit of a "skeleton crew" mode, where keeping up with regular updates and other reactive work was consuming most of our available bandwidth and time as a group; in that context, moving from the (usually) relatively straightforward updates of stock Mastodon to a setup in which we need to be applying patches and potentially troubleshooting associated issues seemed if nothing else a bit risky. I am happy to announce the social.coop TWG is now healthy again -- meeting regularly and well-staffed after an influx of new members -- so we are in a much better position to take on extra commitments.

Third, because of the risks associated with the change, we decided to take the long way and set up an 'alpha' instance for social.coop where we can try patches like this -- not only on first application but before potentially tricky updates in the future (made trickier by the fact that our database will contain "unsupported" posts from the PoV of the Mastodon project). Here is where I have to apologize, because I didn't make enough progress here as I wanted to during 2025; other projects like a needed disk expansion of our main server took time, but mostly I just failed to volunteer enough time to this. I will try to do better in 2026!

Now, after all this, granted this change could still be said to be relatively safe; after all, albeit unsupported, many instances already run with higher character limits and they seem to be doing fine so far. But the TWG takes our commitment to stability seriously, given that so many people trust their data to us, so moving safely has taken precedence over moving fast so far. If the community is in sore need of this change and alpha.social.coop is further delayed (say, beyond Q1 this year), we could discuss within the TWG just abandoning this safe route and taking some extra risk.

Hope this helps! Please let us know if you have any questions or comments?

OK - so it sounds like Mastodon is actively blocking this change - thought they don't says so.

I guess the choice is now, either for Social.coop to
a: move to a different fork (which I guess is the whole point of having a fediverse) or
b: Apply the patches that @Evan Boehs posted 2.5 years ago, in a minimally divergent fork.
c: Say goodbye (no bad feelings) to those of us who find Mastodon next to useless as it stands.

@Evan Boehs - do you know if your patches are still current to current version of Mastodon, I know of one other progressive coop dealing with the same issue of it being a much requested feature, so I'm going to point them at the your PR in case it works for them (and move over to them, if they can get this done).

@Mitra Ardron on the 'consider alternatives' front, we have bootstrapped an experimental Bonfire instance for social.coop members interested in testing: bonfire.social.coop. Bonfire does not have the same limits as Mastodon and has other advantages, but accounts created there are completely independent from the Mastodon profiles of social.coop members (this might be a pro or a con) and currently we have no support model for it (so it might break more than the Mastodon instance does). If you're interested in testing, let me know and I'll send out an invite?

@Flancian That sounds like a good step, but I'm not sure user-testing (as opposed to dev testing) helps - with the accounts being separate its a bit pointless to create a new account and post from there as nobody will be following it. If I'm going to go thru the process of transferring followers, I'd rather do it from some place I know is going to stuck around.

@Mitra Ardron But at least you would be able to test out posting with a larger character limit, so you can see how the difference feels. :D

@Billy Smith I know what posting with a larger limit feels like - its what happens on other platforms (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook). Not much point posting something that nobody will read (because they aren't following the test account).

@Mitra Ardron ahoy! Just a quick heads up that testing of our patching/deployment strategy is going well in alpha.social.coop:

https://alpha.social.coop/@admin/115946788972605027

So I expect we'll be able to apply the same strategy successfully to the production instance soon.

@Flancian Thanks

Hi @Flancian
While I am one of those that pushed for that char limit change, I'd like to ask to please stop saying "I'm sorry I couldn't put more time". We all appreciate the time everyone in the TWG and other WG (community, finance, legal, organizing, etc.) are putting there.

I really want to push up that char limit, but never at the cost of burning anyone in the process. We are all doing what we can.

So thank you, and now that the TWG is better staffed, let's go for it. :)
Best regards for you and everyone that is doing the work behind the scenes that keep social.coop running strong. :)

@Eduardo Mercovich Thank you Eduardo for your patience and understanding!

Another update :) alpha.social.coop is now up, so we are unblocked to actually test this change with a reasonable setup.

More information: https://www.loomio.com/d/C4HKmTOa/proposal-to-revisit-extending-the-character-limit-for-posts/119

Hi all! The bump to 1k characters limit is now done :D See https://social.coop/@flancian/116013829667309196 for more.

If you'd like to explore ever higher character limits, feel free to propose a vote for another increase; adjusting it further should be significantly easier/safer than doing it for the first time.

I already commented on the source thread, thank you so much. :)))))