Increase character limit for TFTRocks Mastodon posts

[peterkaminski]

On TFTRocks Mastodon, the current character limit for posts is the Mastodon default, 500 characters.

I bump into the limit regularly, and actually just don't post sometimes because I've got something interesting but too long.

Sure, you can chop a longer post up into multiple posts in a "thread", but that is not well supported (neither the chopping, nor trying to make sure everyone will be able to read all the messages in the right order).

I've seen another server that has a 5,000 character limit. I propose we increase the character limit to 2,500 or 5,000 characters.

What are some of the technical and social issues involved? What next?

[bmann]

I think it’s a great idea.

My thoughts around the TFTRocks instance was that it can be tuned for the people that use it. I’m +1 on longer character limits.

The issues are (mostly) technical, assuming we can get our small group to be OK with longer character limits.

TFTRocks runs on Spacebear https://spacebear.ee, a managed provider. So we don’t have access to the codebase.

And Mastodon — which we run the main / plain codebase — doesn’t support configurable character limits. You need to edit the code!

The Hometown fork supports this through config. So, we could move to Hometown, which has a few other features.

[peterkaminski]

+1 for moving to Hometown.

Question: will having a larger character limit have any impact on federation? Are there servers that wouldn't want to federate with us if we ship longer posts?