Let the admins easily setup the character limits

[filippodb]

Pitch

I found useful to keep the 500 characters limit but many instances are already changed this limits, so why can't we let the admins to easily decide how their istances manage the characters limit.

Motivation

I love the mastodon microblogs format, the 500 characters limits should be set by default, but the character limits had sense back in 2006, everybody were already typing with a 140 characters limits with mobile phones.
Now in 2019 almost everybody are using whatsapp/telegram/signal without limits.
So this limits has little sense now, another point is I would like to have an instance that give 3 times bigger messages (1000) than actual twitter (who as now increased to 280 but had a little impact on platform) so to attract more people that were put off from twitter because of this limit.

many instances and many new users should find it more attractive to have a social not so limited on short messages.
nothing will change, just a few users will better articolate some toots, other users will keep writing short toots
bigger toots will be visible on the first 500 characters so to not change the timeline.
some instances on shared hosting like mine can't really do this change on code so this feature will help to create more instances,
It'll be useful on educational purposes: schools, universities etc.
will help a lot with youngest that have almost no dea of what was the 140 character limit ;)
Many people are upset with Facebook but they won't jump on mastodon due to writing restrictions.
none of the biggest socials have writing limits (instagram, Facebook, whatsapp, tumblr, snapchat has 1196 limit) so it'll be easier to migrate to mastodon.

[Cassolotl]

Gargron has commented on this in the past: #5697 (comment)

But that was two years ago, so his preference might have changed since then!

[filippodb]

Gargron has commented on this in the past: #5697 (comment)

But that was two years ago, so his preference might have changed since then!

yep, and I agree with gargron, the default should be 500, and longer toots should be visible/stored up to 500th carachters and let users free to expand the message or not.

in the meantime a lot of users are creating mastodon istances on shared enviroment (like masto.host in my case) that make impossible to customize the characters limits.

I totally agree to not let people increase image/audio/video sizes to not increase server costs, but few more charachters couldn't change that much.
maybe we should add an editing range from 500 to 5000 maximum keeping 500 as default.

Also 2 years ago there weren't the one user instances or private instances, so in this case people should be free to easily customize their own private instance.

[elaine-jackson]

Gargron has commented on this in the past: #5697 (comment)
But that was two years ago, so his preference might have changed since then!

yep, and I agree with gargron, the default should be 500, and longer toots should be visible/stored up to 500th carachters and let users free to expand the message or not.

in the meantime a lot of users are creating mastodon istances on shared enviroment (like masto.host in my case) that make impossible to customize the characters limits.

I totally agree to not let people increase image/audio/video sizes to not increase server costs, but few more charachters couldn't change that much.
maybe we should add an editing range from 500 to 5000 maximum keeping 500 as default.

Also 2 years ago there weren't the one user instances or private instances, so in this case people should be free to easily customize their own private instance.

While mastohost makes it easier to setup an instance, we should encourage admins to setup on their owner servers to decentralize Mastodon hosting. Having all instances in one place isn't a good idea :|

[elaine-jackson]

(Sorry about that! GitHub bugged out, told me I can't comment at this time, and posted my content twice)

[hialvaro]

Is there any way to do this? Even if it has to be done by a "non official way"... I don't understand why the administrators aren't allowed to change the character limit, even I have read @Gargron 's reasons on older posts. Each administrator is responsible for their instance and chooses what are their needs. In the end people who write long posts have to make very long threads... I don't see it as a bad thing... Federating with Pleroma already makes appear some longer-than-500-chacter posts on the timeline.

[kamysheblid]

Is there any way to do this? Even if it has to be done by a "non official way"... I don't understand why the administrators aren't allowed to change the character limit, even I have read @Gargron 's reasons on older posts. Each administrator is responsible for their instance and chooses what are their needs. In the end people who write long posts have to make very long threads... I don't see it as a bad thing... Federating with Pleroma already makes appear some longer-than-500-chacter posts on the timeline.

I made a shell script. You just execute it by telling it how many characters you want and where you mastodon repo is.
https://github.com/kamysheblid/mastodon_max_characters

[SchnWalter]

Judging by what I've seen so far, plus the wording on the repo:

Your self-hosted, globally interconnected microblogging community

And on the official website:

Sharing your thoughts has never been more convenient

Mastodon tries to position itself as an alternative to birdsite and I'm afraid we can't really expect this to change in the near future. So maybe it's time to jump ship, if you want longer posts.

[wolfteeth]

There are a few superficial details like this that I think would be great to make admin-customizable. People end up forking the software to modify:

• The post character limit.
• Terms for "post", "boost", and "favorite" in the Notifications.
• Icons for boost and favorite on each post in the timeline.
• The title of the button that publishes posts (which @Gargron called out today re: how he now dislikes calling posts "toots").

It would be great to make all of these easily customizable via the admin interface. The push to be more generic is, I think, to make the software easier for newbies to understand, which makes more sense on larger open-signup instances. For small and closed communities, which are largely people who moved from larger instances to smaller ones, customization is huge for creating your own local flavor.

Plus people would care much less about what the default terms are if different communities can easily change them. :)

[adulau]

What's the current status for this issue? I couldn't find in version 4.0.2 any way to specify the post character limit.

[idi-moe]

What's the current status for this issue? I couldn't find in version 4.0.2 any way to specify the post character limit.

are you referring to an official way to do it or editing the files directly? because editing them directly still works.

[jwgn]

Any plans on adding a web UI settings option to increase the limit? Many people including me are looking for this right now, but the current way seems way to complicated for such a simple configuration change.

[adulau]

What's the current status for this issue? I couldn't find in version 4.0.2 any way to specify the post character limit.

are you referring to an official way to do it or editing the files directly? because editing them directly still works.

Yep I'm referring that changing the source code to change the size limit sounds like a bit awkward when an admin configuration option would do the job cleanly. Patching the files is also cumbersome if you want to be inline with the release.

[gramakri]

are you referring to an official way to do it or editing the files directly? because editing them directly still works.

If mastodon decides to make a breaking change around this area, like say a database migration which limits the size of the database field or some changes in the protocol that limits the size, then all existing patched instances will be non-updatable or lose data. IMO, this is a huge risk. Just putting this note out here so people don't patch the limits without understanding the consequences.

[adulau]

I see the point but looking at the current practices with many production instances like infosec.exchange running a fork with different size of toot and format (Markdown). The lack of this feature is driving away users to use the forks supporting it.

[idi-moe]

are you referring to an official way to do it or editing the files directly? because editing them directly still works.

If mastodon decides to make a breaking change around this area, like say a database migration which limits the size of the database field or some changes in the protocol that limits the size, then all existing patched instances will be non-updatable or lose data. IMO, this is a huge risk. Just putting this note out here so people don't patch the limits without understanding the consequences.

What would an example of a breaking change be? And why would they do it? It seems to me that anything that would fail or cause issues due to something like this would be lazy design not considering externalities.