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.

[rkingett]

Many Blind administrators of Mastodon want this that are using providers that do not have Hometown. For example, see this,

Many Blind users find it easier to read long posts rather than 60 short posts strung together in a thread.

https://livingblindfully.social/@podcast/110197751293428725

[penguin42]

One reason to increase it would be to discourage screenshots of text; at the moment you can attach a screenshot of 2kb of text to a message with only 500 bytes of actual text limit; that's really bad practice to encourage. Even odder is that you can then attach alt-text of 1200 bytes to that; so you can have more text but only in obscure ways! I'd like to actively discourage users from attaching screenshots of text - that's a way worse practice than longer toots.

[snowmanninja]

Any update on this as the current work around is prone to leaving instances unsecure if they mess up something in the changes when they update mastodon to latest release.

for me the benefit is that it allows users to post "encrypted messages" putting the requirement of secure messaging on the user in a decentralised network and less expecting each admin to ensure their privacy and with most key exchange processes between users you could end up with a 1000 character PGP message that would not easily work if they wanted to securely message via DM or play any kind of encryption chain messaging games.

[itbeard]

Any updates here?

[ratcatcher]

Is there any further progress on this? I understood that there was a plan to make it configurable via the admin console, but that seems to have been put on the back burner.

[Sieboldianus]

It looks like this PR is quite ready to be merged #27629, which would allow admins to set character limits via env MAX_TOOT_CHARS.

[masukomi]

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. - @gramakri

a) Mastodon uses Postgres and TEXT field type for statuses. Text fields in Postgres have no character limit.
b) NONE of the changes required to increase the max post size involve database changes
c) Mastodon already supports posts of > 500 characters because it stores and displays posts of greater lengths from other servers without issue.

It looks like this PR is quite ready to be merged #27629, which would allow admins to set character limits via env MAX_TOOT_CHARS. - @Sieboldianus

That's an improvement BUT there are literally thousands of mastodon sites being hosted by Masto.host NONE of us have access to the command line OR the ability to change environment variables. Yes we could self host but that requires a much higher level of technical skill AND a time commitment to staying on top of regular security updates to mastodon AND the server. On top of all that it's going to cost at least 2x as much as letting Masto.host (or similar) host it.

@Gargron 's argument that some other fediverse instances might not be able to handle larger posts is fundamentally flawed because that's ALWAYS true. There may currently, or in the future, be fediverse instances out there that only support 50 character "nano-posts", or whatever. If I make a new fediverse client that supports fewer characters than mastodon will Mastodon devs lower the number of characters allowed to match mine? No. of course not. Thus the argument about problems with other instances supporting it is BS. Preventing us from making posts that it is inherently capable of handling is just arbitrary opinion.

IF mastodon's goal is to be careful that anything it emits works well with other instances then it MUST find the lowest common denominator amongst mastodon-like tools and never produce posts that exceed their capabilities. This is obviously a stupid suggestion, and mastodon has clearly NOT been attempting to do it. SO, if the goal is NOT to be careful that everything that it emits makes other instances happy then there's no good reason to limit this functionality to people with command line access and geek skills.

The fediverse is supposed to be about removing centralized control. Let admins decide for themselves how long they're willing to make posts.

[EmilJacobs]

Any update on this as the current work around is prone to leaving instances unsecure if they mess up something in the changes when they update mastodon to latest release.

for me the benefit is that it allows users to post "encrypted messages" putting the requirement of secure messaging on the user in a decentralised network and less expecting each admin to ensure their privacy and with most key exchange processes between users you could end up with a 1000 character PGP message that would not easily work if they wanted to securely message via DM or play any kind of encryption chain messaging games.

This should probably deserve its own issue, but that's a great idea! It would elegantly encrypt DMs without much change in the codebase.

As for the topic at hand: I'm also on masto.host and don't have access to the code files. I would therefore appreciate any updates on this.

[boehs]

It looks like this PR is quite ready to be merged #27629, which would allow admins to set character limits via env MAX_TOOT_CHARS.

I've reopened another PR, #30091