Can we please have a setting in the administrator panel to set the character limit for a Mastodon instance?
The current lack of such a setting does nothing apart from create a two-tier fediverse where folks who have the time to maintain their own Mastodon fork and folks who use other ActivityPub servers can write as much as they like whereas everyone else is limited to 500 characters. We’re not kids; make the option accessible and let instance owners decide for themselves.
Not just highly upvoted. It’s from 2019, without a comment from gargron. Which presumably means he doesn’t like the idea, and he is masto’s beneficent dictator for life of course.
Which means, I think, that for everyone who finds the character limit somewhere between annoying and cringey (I’m on the cringe side) … we should really think about the value of some platform diversity on the Fedi. More Masto forks support, firefish/akkoma/lemmy instances etc.
@aral a temporary workaround for those who want a higher limit is to use my fork https://github.com/BlackLight/mastodon. It's basically the vanilla version (reasonably up-to-date with the latest stable release), with two small changes - one to increase the character limit to 10k, and one to increase the profile custom fields to 10.
I think that there have also been some PRs pushed to the main repo to add an admin panel option, but for some reason the maintainers have always pushed back.
IMHO the fact that the maintainers keep pushing back on widely requested features (like custom character limit, quotes, and even the most basic markdown support, such as inline links) is one of the reasons why I believe that picking up Mastodon for my instance was a mistake - sure, I can invest enough time to implement the features myself, but why would I use up my time to not only write those features, but also to keep them up-to-date with the upstream basically forever, knowing that they're very unlikely to ever be merged? And the stubbornly conservative and opinionated position of some maintainers on such features is really holding back the development of the Fediverse as a whole.
@aral if Mastodon became like Facebook with most posts being ones I have to page down to read, I would leave it. The micro blogging is the point, for me. The ideas have so much more weight when each piece must stand on its own as a comprehensive thought.
@aral Whatever the solution ends up being, please include that limit (that value) it the "about" for the application (and) instance since one can override the other. This discussion has been going on for a year or more without a clear answer beyond "it's not my problem."
I see your point but this might be the wrong tool for this need.
There's very little formatting options, let alone a table of contents to navigate larger posts or an appropriate view to render such long posts effectively.
There's a bunch of blogging systems that also support activity pub, which will be a better pick.
@aral 500 characters is 3 times the twitter limit. The mastodon UI is made for short posts. And what we’re not talking about is the fact that’s about 100 words. If you can’t make your point, maybe the content isn’t meant for a microblogging service.
@aral I don't understand the point of having such a pathetically small character limit to begin with other than to imitate Twitter, which is even worse in this aspect so why on Earth would you want to imitate that?
@aral In this age of social media I bet I'm not the only one who tends to scroll past posts that are more than about 10 lines long. It'll take awhile for posters to realise that...
@virtulis Thanks, but it’s not feasible when you have it hosted by a third party (like toot.io or Mastohost). It’s just too much work for them to maintain forks for everyone they host. And I don’t have the time to do it myself.
@aral true, true. Well that link was mostly for anyone who does host themselves but isn't eager to go search the code for magic numbers :)
But yes this is quite ridiculous.
I mentioned config since it is also hard-coded in client code, so having those values at asset build time would probably allow keeping that for now :blobcatgooglyshrug:
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