Shall we consider GotoSocial?

If its easier for admin and has a lower running cost I think it is worth considering.
For myself, I don't really worry too much about having the 'latest' features on Mastodon. (However - the character limit is a social.coop thing, not a Mastodon thing, right? On my previous instance, fediphilosophy.org, the character limit was much much higher.)

Of course there's also the question of the cost of migration, which I just have no idea about.

@pjwerner1 We voted some time ago to increase the character limit. As I understand (and someone in the know please correct me), the mastodon server software doesn't expose the character limit as a configuration parameter, so to increase the character limit requires patching the code, which would make upgrading the server software more difficult. I think the TWG was trying to work out how to do it reliably.

I think losing follows/followers would be a deal breaker for me. Personally, unless there are real quantifiable cost or performance savings that address actual problems we’re having as an instance, I see no reason to explore it, but I wouldn’t stop others from doing so as long as my experience on the instance is largely preserved. I use Ivory as a client so the web interface isn’t important to me… just that it “works.”

If I understand your proposal correctly, you would

"set up a social.coop instance of GotoSocial (in parallel with Mastodon)"

so the Mastodon site would still work and GotoSocial would also work?
So (for example) I could continue to interact with social.coop on mastodon as I do now, but I could also try out GotoSocial. Would the same posts appear in both of them? I don't care, just thinking about the situation. I already use more than one fediverse site, so one more or less will not matter a lot to me.

Regardless, I am ok with your proposal and will ride along with whatever waves happen.

...and migrating followers does not matter to me one way or the other.

I'm in favor of using GotoSocial. That's what Ocotodon was using before it shut down. Not only is the character limit easily settable but it also supports Markdown (text formatting) and has a wider range of themes to choose from than Mastodon.

Giving it a look. For others' reference, the current docs can be found at https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/v0.19.1/ (plain old https://gotosocial.org apparently doesn't work at all, which confused me for a while).

We should note that it's still in beta, and will be for a while yet. So I don't mind experimenting with it, but we should keep our expectations a bit limited. And those experiments probably depend on somebody being motivated to lead them.

Personally, losing my follower list is kind of a deal-breaker at this point (I post a good deal, and have a fairly deep network); hopefully they can figure out a way to port those lists before they get to release.

More generally, I don't necessarily care about all the newest-and-spluftiest Mastodon features, but the devil's in the details there. I do care passionately that it's compatible with clients (especially Ivory); it sounds like it might be, but we would need to kick the tires.

I see some indications that GtS doesn't have its own UI, which might matter quite a lot to some folks (not everybody uses an installed client) -- we would need to ascertain whether that's the case.

@Justin du Coeur I don't know where this "GtS doesn't have its own UI" claim is coming from, but when I was on Octodon it had a web interface similar to Mastodon's. Maybe that was Octodon's admin's doing but I have a hard time believing that Fediverse software wouldn't have its own web interface.

@Dave V. ND9JR Like I said, I'm only looking into this now.

The first article I read on the subject (which was generally extolling the virtues of GtS) says, "It's also worth noting that GtS doesn’t come with a front-end interface; to use it, you'll need third-party software." -- that's what I'm reacting to.

That said, that article is a little old (last November), so it might be out of date, or possibly just plain inaccurate -- I don't know.

Personally I like Mastodon, it has flaws of course but overall it has a very polished UX. If we were to pursue this I think we should set up an experimental parallel instance first for members to try it out. And I would want to obtain consent from the TWG that they have the bandwidth for this as well before calling a vote.

Also I would want to understand more about the governance and funding of the gotosocial project. Just because it's under active development now is not a guarantee it will always be if the project doesn't have a critical mass of sustainable funding and volunteers. Mastodon gGmbh has issues, but it's well-funded and I think is likely to be able to provide long-term maintenance and support for the software.

And if at some point we were wanting to migrate completely to Gotosocial, losing any sort of linkage between my followers, follows, post permalinks, lists, third party mobile clients, etc. would be a dealbreaker for me.