@AG I agree and I find it helpful to have to pare down my posts to 500 characters.

Seconding @Eliot Lash 's comment! I would want to defer to the tech working group about this. If they can confirm that merely patching our otherwise default mastodon instance is both the right solution and easy to maintain, then I think we can have a clearer conversation about whether extending the post limit is something we actually want. Since currently this conversation is about two things simultaneously.

Assuming that TWG confirms its easy though, I would very much support extending the post limit. Most mastodon clients already but long posts behind a fold, so I don't see how this has any drawbacks. My personal bias is that I think character limits below approximately 1000 artificially constrain discussion enough that it meaningfully and negatively impacts expression, incentivizing hot takes and flattening nuance.

@maren - stillgreenmosssocial.coop for what it's worth, I just skimmed the codebase and it appears that all references to 500 tie back to this file, including in the frontend. If it is really as simple as changing 500 to something like 1500 in this one specific spot, this feels like the right way to go, it could be potentially as simple as:

sed -e "s/MAX_CHARS = [0-9]*/MAX_CHARS = 1500/" ./app/validators/status_length_validator.rb 

(note: untested)

Like others, I'd want the TWG to weigh in. Socially, though, I have drifted in my thoughts - I originally found 500 a nice forcing function, but now feel like something in the 1000 range would be nice. Like others, I don't want it "too long" (and acknowledge that's completely subjective when it flips over). But I'd like something along the lines of 1000 characters.

@Jonobie Ford Agreed. Usually I find myself about 100-200 characters over, so anywhere between 750-1000 would be ideal

Got to admit that I would be against extending the character limit because I personally find creativity in that limit in my posts. It's hard to be brief. Practice makes it easier.

I would also agree with only taking on this change if we have someone willing to maintain that fork.

I wouldn’t want more characters, and even if I did, I wouldn’t want to burden the tech group with the extra work that it would entail.

I'd vote for a longer post limit. If you already skip longer posts, that's great - no one is asking you to write longer posts, you're free to keep skipping them. Increasing the limit won't affect your habits, but it will be very beneficial to folks who need more space. I enjoy longer posts, both reading them and writing them, and wish that it were easier.

It's rare (like a handful of times in the last 18mos) I see anything longer than 800-900 characters - and Mastodon has auto-collapsed those, so it isn't like I'm looking at an essay all at once, I have to open the post to read it all and it's easy to skip if I'm not interested. But if that's the fear, and it's that easy to change the limit, why not shift it to 1k characters (rather than 10k or whatever)?

Personally, I'd like a bit more room in my posts. I often end up having to thread pretty heavily when I get into discussions with people. It's one thing to do in my own isolated posts I'm throwing out into the fedi, but the 500 cap makes it pretty tedious to have conversations. Relaxing this out a bit, even to 750-1000, would be a big improvement to my experience. Though I consider all of that moot if the TWG says it'll be a big deal to implement and maintain.

My experience as Twitter increased its character limits, and then as I moved to Mastodon with its higher default limit, is thaf my posts have tended to become longer as the limits increased. It has an effect on the style of my writing and on the flow of conversation.

My feeling is that 500 characters is about optimum; I can express a thought with sufficient context that I find that simple misunderstandings are rare. It feels relaxed to me.

This is all subjective, and I'm not strongly opposed to an increased character limit.

I personally enjoyed having a 1000 character limit previous servers - it gave more space to ruminate and to provide full quotes from the book I was reading. But it seems like adopting a fork of Mastodon is a high-effort task to undertake for that convenience. I advise that we should only take on a migration if there were other benefits we felt necessitated a change (and we felt that maintenance costs would not go up as the result of adopting a less-well-maintained fork.)

As others, I would very much enjoy a higher char limit. Also, I understand that it takes almost nothing from keep our writing as compact as we desire.

With that in mind, as other too, I would very much like to know from the tech working group (TWG) how much effort is maintaining that patch (however small it can be).

It could be good to weigh this with the possibility of changing from Mastodon (Md) to Hometown (Ht), since Ht not only includes the char limit as a configurable variable, but also adds a layer of publication that currently in Md we don't have: the community. In Ht you can publish to the whole Fediverse, to your community, to your followers, or mentioned ones (DM).

I think (based on reading, not direct experience) that this would add a valuable space for Social Coop and -indirectly- to our use of the Fediverse as a social communication tool/space.

Best...

We discussed this at the TWG open house. There are a number of next steps and challenges we identified:

• Mastodon is deployed from Docker, so we'd need to maintain our own image

  • It's deployed with Ansible and Mastodon is in Ruby, so theoretically we could livepatch in deployment using `docker exec`

  • If we go this route, we should run an alpha

• Mastodon recently reduced the hard coded locations to one place here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/28928, but there is still no ENV. My action item is to research why it is this way, and potentially nudge it along.

  • This consolidation hasn't even yet landed — will in 4.3, so revisit then.

Once we get to a place where it is technically feasible (by completing either one of ^), I will run a poll to decide if a change should be made.

Having read through the thread, I'm inclined to leave things as they are, pending feedback from TWG. Anything that requires touching whenever updates are received, while not a fork, certainly involves one more thing to track and deal with. Since it's possible to break posts up, I recommend this for those who want to write longer posts.

I feel that this proposal requires a deeper discussion or maybe explanation about what social.coop's role is in Mastodon and what Mastodon's role is in the fediverse and what, really, is the fediverse? If I can follow anyone on the fediverse then why does there need to be a Mastodon at all? I come here for micro-blogging, not blogging or videos or whatever, so is it simply my responsibility to only follow people who micro-blog? Or is it an essential function of Mastodon to pre-filter the fediverse for me to make it easier to limit my view to just micro-bloggers? Or is there some other essential function of Mastodon? I genuinely don't know the answers to these questions.

@Kenneth Been

I could be misunderstanding something, but I don't think that filtering to just microblogging platforms is even an option (unless we wanted to explicitly block non-microblogging instances, which I don't think is an idea anyone has suggested).

@Dynamic

I'm not proposing that! I'm saying that the question of what character limit we want is related to the question of what Mastodon is, vis-a-vis the fediverse, and I don't understand that very well so it's hard for me to speak intelligently about the proposal. Since we can interact with non-Mastodon fediverse posts via Mastodon, what makes Mastodon Mastodon? And would expanding the character limit diminish whatever that is?

@Kenneth Been

I didn't think you were proposing it, but it sounded like you were attaching that question to the question of whether social.coop should increase our word limit, which seemed strange and made me wonder if we had a different understanding of what is being discussed here.

I agree with increasing the character limit. For some of the responses here against it, I see people are mentioning reading other's long posts as a reason against, but reading is optional. You can scroll past long posts of your own free will. So that isn't a good enough reason to not increase the limit, to me.

I notice the character limit most when I am trying to have conversations with others, which is my favorite part of mastodon. I think longer character limits foster deeper connection. Connection and conversation are indicators of something good, IMO. And I also really love when I see that "read more" link. I love opening up a long post to see what someone has written.

I do still see how it's fun to try and craft a message in fewer characters as a way of challenging yourself creatively, but again that could be something you impose upon yourself, much like scrolling past longer posts by choice (if you see that "read more" link, you can scroll on by). It could be your choice to do that even with a longer character limit, without impacting those who do want a little bit more room to express their thoughts.

That said, it's not something I care enough about if the technical side is too much effort.

Also keep in mind that you don't actually see longer posts - you see a post that has a link at the bottom that says, "Expand to see full post". It's incredibly easy to ignore for the folks who want to ignore those. Just don't read the longer ones if that's your preference.

Breaking posts up - especially when you have one full post and then two sentences on the next - is clunky, visually jarring, and can be confusing when someone is reading something and is forced to cobble together the context by clicking through and reading up. Breaking posts up also makes POSSE and FOSSE complicated when you write a post somewhere else and then you can't cross-post properly because your post was 529 characters.

Expanding the character limit would very positively affect some members and be entirely neutral to the rest. If you don't want to post longer posts, then don't. There is no down side to this - unless it's a tech issue, which as far as I'm aware, the Tech Group hasn't commented on this? Did I miss it?

@Hollie Butler I represented the tech group here: https://www.loomio.com/d/C4HKmTOa/proposal-to-revisit-extending-the-character-limit-for-posts/23

Basically:

1. Mastodon authors are somewhat hostile to configurable character limits

2. And yet in the next mastodon version, they will make our lives easier to do it anyway, but not completely easy

3. Due to docker, its a little harder, but potentially possible

4. Somebody (me; or you (gestures widely) can beat me to it) can use a test server to try it out.

Edit: I opened https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/30091. Feel free to lobby there ;P

@Sam Whited its hard because I think there's a big difference between write.as levels of content length and 1000 characters worth of length. I specifically run up against this limit a lot when engaging in conversation with others, and it is unclear how effective the context switch from mastodon to one of these services would go mid conversation, if it worked at all. That being said, I would also be quite interested in offering write.as to social.coop users in the future

If this happens to not pass, I propose the following scheme for further investigation: get a sample of threads (including length-1 "threads") across the instance for the last N months, and compute the median character count. If that number is far greater than, say, 1.5x the 500 limit, then I find that cause to raise it to what would be a more empirically grounded number. (And who knows, maybe we find shorter is preferred!)

@Abdi-Hakin Dirie I do not contest your concern in the first paragraph. I've certainly edited my posts down to meet the limit. Sometimes I wasn't able to (and made a thead), but sometimes I was. But in regards to the comments on technicalities, its not really a fork. Its running the following code each time the server turns on:

sed -i e 's/500/1000/g' [trimmed]/compose_form.jsx && sed -i -e 's/500/1000/g' [trimmed]/status_length_validator.rb && rails assets:precompile && /start.sh"

The objective of the proposal was to make a decision assuming that there is no technical complexity, only social ones. If this change is implemented and we later decide we don't want it, we can just remove the first few lines of the script and all is well.

Edit: and in regards to your suggestion, this is a great idea, if someone wanted to take it on and/or if I get around to it. Also, if we did try 1000 characters, it would be interesting to see how the median changes.

Edit edit: or, really, we could do this study before trying it ourselves by looking at other servers (though this might be a chicken or the egg / correlation vs causation situation as something like "writers.social" would be expected to have a larger limit)

@Evan Boehs Thanks for the clarification. My vote still stands, but I'm glad to know it's easy to undo should the collective decide so later.

@Django in response to this comment, on our test instance, no changes were made other than increasing the limit to 10,000. The lorum ipsum text was repeated 10 times. This is the result:

In other words, stock mastodon already supports collapsing long posts.

Still, at the 1000 limit, the collapsing behaviour would not be observed anyway (for all local posts, anyway). We've discussed both hometown and glitch extensively as a TWG, and the conclusion always is that we're going to need to have a more nuanced discussion with the community (a discussion that is entirely independent of the character limit). All in due time.

To further understand your response, are you stating that you are overall against extending the limit, or that you are for the limit increase, but only if it is paired with a fork? Does the fact that stock mastodon supports collapsing posts change your opinion?

@Evan Boehs thanks for your response, i appreciate the TWG work testing out the possibilities.

I will revise my answer

@Randy Hall I do read threads (if they interest me) and use the excellent Phanpy client which orders and numbers them. https://phanpy.social/ Still find it helpful to have a single concise post introduce the thread. It's like a title/summary that lets me know if I want to read on. Long individual posts, especially if appearing by way of a boost or hashtag follow, take too much time to evaluate what they're about and if they're interesting.

@Randy Hall

I actually think there's even more to the problem with long Mastodon posts than @Scott Feeney notes here.

I just posted a thread about it on Mastodon: https://social.coop/@dynamic/112428200242353565

None of this is to say that "threads" (a term I really dislike but I don't know a better word for microblog monologues) are "good" and longform posts are "bad", but I do think that allowing longer posts moves Mastodon further away from its strengths.

It feels easy to say "well, people who don't like longform posts don't have to write that way or follow people who do", but I think the reality is we would all write differently without the 500-character cap, and that that change is not without tradeoffs.

@Robert Guthrie not that this is a good point because twitter has gone to hell, but at this point their character limit is 25,000

I'm only commenting on my own personal use-case for a longer character limit because I've genuinely no idea how it'll affect the community at large, or other people's experiences.

@benjamin melançon This would be sweet, noted!

Great job summarizing and sharing the outcome, Evan! Thank you for your work here shepherding this experiment forward.

Many of my comments on Mastodon are technical answers that are difficult to fit in the limit, and breaking it into multiple replies is less good. The posts I originate can usually be edited to fit but when replying to questions that require a lot of detail in the answer it's more difficult.

Social Stuff

I respect other people's desire to keep their own posts short, but I think that opposing increasing the character limit because they have grown used to the 500 character limit as some optimum of brevity veers pretty strongly into "you shouldn't want what you want" territory for me. Long posts clogging the feed is a UI problem that other forks have solved (and we should as well, see below) and is an entirely separate issue from whether we should raise the character limit. as others have noted in thread, reading is optional, so by longposting you aren't 'demanding other people's attention' any more than you are when you are regularposting. If techwg says they can maintain the fork, then i don't see any reason not to raise the character limit - let ppl express themselves how they want. It is deeply patronizing to me to say things like 'having a low character count is what makes creativity/culture/etc work' - don't impose your beliefs about what 'works' or not on me or anyone else, imposing those beliefs on others is contrary to the cooperative spirit to me. If you like brevity, cool. If you want to longpost, also cool. I think it's an especially pretty hard sell to suggest there is some qualitative culture-breaking threshold somewhere between 500 and 1000 characters.

Technical stuff

I run an instance with a 10k character limit that's a fork of glitch, and whenever I use social.coop I am both astonished that base masto a) doesn't expose this parameter more easily, but more importantly b) doesn't have a "collapse long posts" feature.

So, eg. here's what my profile with a pinned long post looks like on our glitch fork:

and here's what it looks like on social.coop

so there is a "read more" button that then takes you to the full post, which works for a post within a feed, but since masto uses the [same component in notifications](https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/616789454707be00b334070646491b5e028d3be6/app/javascript/mastodon/features/notifications/components/notification.jsx#L208) then any long post makes your notifications unusable. I see above that the collapse behavior has been noted, but it's a) not enough of a collapse, it would still totally break your notifs and b) the UI is awkward, taking you to another page rather than expand/collapse in-page.

like this is generally true of base masto (notifications are unusable), but is an especially important thing if we have longposts. I think most of the concerns above about long posts are mostly UI concerns - base masto handles them terribly, and so collapsing long posts is like a de-facto "long" c/w where one can see a preview and expand the longer post if they want to see it.

(imo we should be running glitch anyway, but just wanted to put this on ppls radar as another concern)

@jonny twg isn't opposed to glitch, just there hasn't been enough user initiative... and by that I mean we should run an alpha, have a proposal, ect. I think that at 1000 characters, the see more concern isn't particularly pressing — at least not more so than it already was. While I don't feel strongly either way on glitch, I'm willing to drive this once the character limit discussion concludes (and also I agree that "should we run a fork" is (or at least should be) a separate question to "should we change the limit".

When we have that conversation your opinions as an instance admin on glitch will be immensely valuable, stay tuned (or start the conversation yourself!)

But yeah, I agree that at least from a reading perspective not much will change unless you spend a lot of time in the local timeline and/or have a feed of mostly social.coop users, and I still don't think the change will be huge.

@Evan Boehs maintaining a glitch instance is almost identical to maintaining a base masto instance, and we maintain a fork of glitch which is similarly nbd. we merge upstream every few weeks and it is basically never an issue. having the freedom to hack on the instance software is extremely worth it since base masto is broken in a bunch of ways

@jonny

I actually think the social.coop screenshot looks a ton better.

@Dynamic It really doesn't when you see a hundred of those in a row in your notifications, trust me. like yes on its own it looks better but that wasn't the point of my post

@jonny

Do they automatically all expand when you try to read a thread? Because imagining trying to read a thread made of these things just brings on psychosomatic eye strain for me.

@Dynamic it's exactly the same React component in notifs as when displayed normally, so yes without having the narrow collapse it does render like that for every single interaction on a post. this is one of the first things you notice during live usage of masto with longer character counts that's not immediately obvious from the base UX.

it's also true for 'edge case' masto posts. so eg. here's a screenshot of what it looks like when i post a 1px wide, 100000px tall image and then like it from another account. :

so that actually goes on for an unbelievably long scroll distance.

point being that you need the narrow collapse as the default view to make masto sorta usable with longer posts. i would expect that most people in this thread who are talking about short posts being the soul of brevity and how longer posts get in the way/should be on a different medium have just never experienced an instance that handles long posts well.

@jonny

I don't know if you actually answered my question, but it sounds like my guess is correct that this "solution" would make it even harder to read long threads made up of long posts. I'm on the brink of changing my vote to "disagree", just on the basis that allowing longer posts might open us up to this kind of interface shift.

In short, I like things the way they are, including when I see long posts from instances that allow it. I think it's fine for different people to have different use cases with some making longer posts and some making shorter posts and people deciding who to follow accordingly, but I don't want to lose the current interface experience.

@Dynamic sorry if i'm being unclear - i'm saying that the notification problem is the much more impactful one with longer character counts (the proposal at hand) than the reading problem. expanding the posts in a thread is not a big deal at all - unlike in base masto, in glitch the expansions happens in place rather than going to a different page. this makes it actually more possible to read a thread, since otherwise it's impossible to get a sense of the branching structure with the current interface, abbreviating the posts allows you to get a sense of the whole thread much more easily. adding a 'toggle all' button would be trivial, we've never had someone ask for it bc the benefits are pretty obvious once you start using it in context instead of seeing it in a single screenshot.

in glitch this setting is optional and configurable - you can turn off collapsing posts altogether and set the threshold for collapsing. i really think the answer is 'working on the UI' rather than trying to freeze it in place. none of this is necessarily relevant to the question at hand though, i was just trying to raise the notification ui problem as a potentially unforeseen one for anyone who hasn't been on an instance with raised character counts.

since most 'no' votes are talking about how hard it is to read long posts when scrolling in one way or another, i also wanted to say that forks that deal with longer character counts have figured out ways of dealing with them, and the example of the long image shows that those features would benefit base masto even without expanding the character counts - aka that the problems are orthogonal, and difficulty of scrolling through long posts is not a reason to vote no.

@jonny

What I needed to hear was that collapse could be turned off, so thank you for that.

I'll try to keep my relief at that separate from my extreme irritation at what you wrote here,

this makes it actually more possible to read a thread, since otherwise it's impossible to get a sense of the branching structure with the current interface, abbreviating the posts allows you to get a sense of the whole thread much more easily. adding a 'toggle all' button would be trivial, we've never had someone ask for it bc the benefits are pretty obvious once you start using it in context instead of seeing it in a single screenshot.

I've been talking about slightly unpleasant experiences that I've had on Mastodon as it currently is, which I know would be more unpleasant if the longer posts got shortened further. Telling me that I will be able to read long threads better if the individual posts are abbreviated when my lived experience is that it doesn't do that at all is incredibly off-putting.

@jonny

"so by longposting you aren't 'demanding other people's attention' any more than you are when you are regular posting"

Hard agree. In fact I'd go further. When it comes to replying to people rather than being OP, I inwardly cringe every time I end up posting multiple times to get my point across. Putting one long reply into someone's notifications feels like way less of a demand than 2-3 short ones.

@dash82 This is very relevant to me.

I don't have strong feelings about where we set the word limit, but I do have strong feelings against efforts to "aesthetically" shorten longer posts in ways that break up the readability of long threads.

The only real concern I had with longer limits was that I've found it unpleasant trying to read long threads where the individual posts were long enough to trigger the "Read more" link, making it impossible to view the entire thread at once. The Glitch style shortener that Jonny posted a screenshot of looks even worse in my opinion.

As expressed elsewhere: a larger limit means, to me, more freedom for our users; people who don't like it can probably ignore the feature with minimal disruption. Strong yes from me to this experiment!

♡Dear @Evan Boehs

Thanks a lot for the clear explanation and results. :D

As a researcher I'd love to help with the evaluation (these 3 questions "(How) has this changed the way you interacted with Mastodon", "(How) has this changed the culture at social coop" and "If you noticed changes, are you happy with them?"), but this doesn't need to be done now. :)

Thanks @Evan Boehs, this was a great process overall!

I just spent 10 mins hacking sentences over and over to get my 700 chars for a toot into 500, and found myself wondering what the status of this was? It says above there should have been a review by June 13, but I didn't see any mention of it in the recent minutes.

This isn't intended to be pushy – I realise there's multiple steps to this and it's not urgent. But the discussion we all invested in here seemed like a promising area of community democracy, so was just curious to learn what, if anything, is holding things up.

@nicw I'd been wondering this as well. From what I've seen on "social.coop tech chat" on Matrix, it looks like people from the TWG group were trying to persuade the Mastodon team to add a config setting for message length, but the Mastodon team isn't willing to do it.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/30091#issuecomment-2241565907

@Nic To follow up a little more the TWG is standing up an alpha instance to provide a sandbox for testing (do backups work?) and other development, including forking the Mastodon. Forking codebases has a lot of downsides (higher maintenance to move over the security and other updates manually). No promises here. But standing up that alpha instance is a first step.

Thanks @Brian Vaughan & @Kathe TB – I didn't get a notification of a reply so just saw this now. That is disappointing, I hadn't realised a) Mastodon prevents people changing the limit; and b) they rejected a sensible PR on the issue. That is their prerogative - I can imagine their internal debate might be as divided as ours is!

But it does create an impasse. Reminds me why Mastodon desperately needs an extension ecosystem (like PeerTube has), to avoid these functional bottlenecks around the core team's preferences. I agree maintaining our own fork would be too much, and it looks like HomeTown hasn't been updated in 8 months. Misskey gives big lolicon vibes (or at least their home page does). Pleorama seems active but looks clunky. The Pleorama fork Soapbox looks lovely and has quote posts but has some history (is a 'hostile fork'), Akkoma looks less lovely but doesn't have the same fallout - tho also seems critical of Pleorama. Mangane is a fork of Akkoma, and now I'm lost down a rabbit hole, which somehow has Gab in it's history. And here's an even bigger list of Misskey forks. OK, I see why this has stalled! That said there are some nice looking alternatives to Mastodon out there, tho the politics & choice is a bit dizzying.

@Nic

Any thoughts on Glitch?

@Dynamic as in glitch.com/fediverse? I didn't clock it had feddy links til know tbh! I've followed Jenn and Potch - I've not used it much but based on those two being involved it must be good…

@Nic

I'm... not sure, actually. I can't tell whether that's the same thing as https://github.com/glitch-soc or not. I'm on a Mastodon instance that uses the glitch-soc fork, but I've also seen people sing the praises of Glitch, and I assumed it was the same thing, but I feel like maybe I misunderstood.