Increasing post / toot length beyond 500 chars, how and why

Software Mastodon
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How, but most importantly, why [not] to increase the post limit to something like 1000 chars?

In the “why” department, it would be great to hear some past experiences from admins who have already done this configuration change and whether it’s affected their communities in any way.

Over at mine, I’m currently running a poll about it. Some people seem to want it, but it’s not an overwhelming majority, and some are fine with the current limit: Camilo Bravo :bass: :drumset:: "Folks at https://Musicians.Today: what do you thi…" - Musicians Today

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I have been thinking about that too.
For my big instance, I’ve decided against it.
Some reasons

  • Not all users want/need it
  • Not all apps will work with bigger limits
  • It requires changing code, which will be overwritten when updating

What I am now thinking about, is creating a new instance especially for this, for people who need more characters…

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I find 500 characters usually enough for what I need to share. I prefer keeping the long form of conversation to somewhere more stable like this forum or a static web page that I can link in a toot. Using a short limit also forces concise expression, which I find a good exercise.

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Much better-populated poll (on newsie.social), where people still seem to be preferring the current limit: Jeff: "How many characters would you prefer to be allowe…" - Newsie Social

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A thread where configuration was discussed on the glitch-soc fork of Mastodon. Removal of characther limit on toots/profile names · Issue #1490 · glitch-soc/mastodon · GitHub

Based on this the Hometown and Ecko (which I help maintain) forks also made this configurable in the admin panel.

Fediverse.town was an active yet short-lived forum where this among other Mastodon features were discussed. What features should a community driven Mastodon fork have? - Mastodon - Fediverse Town

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I think it is up to the admin and the instance’s community. Hubzilla has no character limit, and it works just fine, even over ActivityPub.

What is interesting is that the 500 character limit in Mastodon only applies to local users, and anyone posting from a different ActivityPub client is not limited to 500 characters, and their full message shows up in Mastodon. It sometimes confuses Mastodon users (i.e. “how did you do that!?!?”) because they don’t realize the restriction is only on them. The rest of the fediverse is not limited to 500 characters.

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