HEY!

Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸

HEY! I just noticed that the “Let admins easily set character limit” issue on Mastodon github had activity in the past 3 weeks?

Can anyone confirm whether this means Mastodon admins will be able to set character limits easily on their instances without needing to manually edit files?!

#SelfHost #Mastodon #Github #Admin #Configuration

Let the admins easily setup the character limits · Issue #12265 · mastodon/mastodon

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 micr...

GitHub (github.com)

Kyle Sawatsky

@chris Nah, it's just someone messing about in their own fork.

I don't know if this is the latest statement, but it's the latest in the trail from that issue. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/30091#issuecomment-2231106261

Basically "No we won't do this...for reasons". Personally I find the reasoning there incredibly weak.

Having been on an instance that supports posting over 2000 characters for quite a while now, I have no idea what their issue is. It already collapses long posts.

This situation seems ridiculous.

Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸

@ksawatsky that's disappointing.

Kathe Todd-Brown

@ksawatsky @chris Yea, some folks from our tech working group tried to engage the devs and were basically shut down a few months ago. We've kicked around the idea of supporting our own fork but worry the overhead might be higher then we can realistically take on. Tagging @flancian incase they have more to add here.

Kyle Sawatsky

@ktoddbrown @chris @flancian

It's got very

"Please use our decentralized social network, it's great!"

"No, not like that!"

energy to it.

Stéphanie Pageau

@chris I'm sure Andrew already told you how you can increase the character count... I really recommend it. A collapsed long message is SO MUCH BETTER than 9 posts in a row for one subject

Anyway, according to me haha
@ksawatsky

In #Flancia we'll meet

@ksawatsky @ktoddbrown @chris the Mastodon project is great in many ways but I do get a slightly authoritarian vibe occasionally from it as a whole. Its members are probably faultless; likely this emerges from strongly opinionated positions on some key issues having to do with user and community preference.

I have documented some of my positions publicly as replies in Github issues

I will link this conversation in the TWG group so other members can give their perspective as well.

Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸

@stephanie @ksawatsky ya for sure. Unfortunately some hosts can't change the character limit because it requires a change to the codebase (ie. ours for socialbc.ca) so we are stuck until mastodon fixes it!

Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸

@flancian @ksawatsky @ktoddbrown This became a live issue for me again as I am using a hosting service* for mastodon that can only use the core distribution of Mastodon without code modifications. So it can't change the character limit. It's insane to me that considering how easy it is to change it in the code, it has not been at least added as part of the .env file configuration for hosts to change.

Resistance to it seems wholly ideological rather than based in any serious technical hangup.

*the identity of which is irrelevant and I don't want to throw it undesiverably under a bus for something it has no control over.

Edwin G. :mapleleafroundel:

@chris @stephanie @ksawatsky
+1 on that boat.

I wish we either could self-configure higher limits (without modifying the codebase) or, in my case, have multilingual post support.

Even if I self-host my instance, I don’t want to maintain my own version of Mastodon.