Mastodon: Remove the toot character limit entirely

[fallerOfFalls]

Why is there a character limit?

Surely there must be a better way of getting people to cut to the chase, or getting that "brief exchange" user experience than arbitrarily limiting the number of characters.

Toot length regulation should be a social issue; it shouldn't be the software that regulates how long your toots are. However it might be good to hide the bulk of toots that are longer than your screen (and perhaps indicate to the user that they are really going on and on and that most of their toot will be hidden. Soft limits are good.

And don't forget the zero-one-infinity rule:

Zero-one-infinity is a design rule-of-thumb that is often ignored - usually to the detriment of the project.
Simply stated: You will either need zero of a thing, one of a thing, or an arbitrary number of the thing.
Programmers and architects ignore this at their own peril. Arbitrary fixed limits are a CodeSmell. --WikiWikiWeb

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• [x] I searched or browsed the repo’s other issues to ensure this is not a duplicate.

[wxcafe]

Misclicked. Assigning @Gargron so he can explain what his reasoning is

[alexgleason]

Isn't this a constraint of GNU Social anyway?

[yiskah]

Mastodon is a micro-blogging platform. If there wasn't a character limit, it would just be a blogging platform.

This would also be very easily abused, even with collapsible posts, as it it could affect server load.

An important design principle is that every post is roughly the same height, which creates a good UX. While some instances do modify their code to change the character limit, this is not officially supported because equality of service is one of the principles of how Mastodon decentralization is intended to work. Using one instance should be roughly the same as another when it comes to the software.

[wxcafe]

Thank you, marking this wontfix and closing then

[fallerOfFalls]

Thank you @yiskah for explaining. Mental itch satisfied.

[Shreewebs]

Can Someone guide on how to increase limit to 600 Please?

[Laurelai]

Edit the following files

app/javascript/mastodon/features/compose/components/compose_form.js
app/validators/status_length_validator.rb

[Shreewebs]

@Laurelai Thank you, I have already modified those files to 600 but no luck.
Can you please suggest some other solution?
OR is there any service that needs to be restarted?

[Laurelai]

Search for every instance of "500" in those files then change them to "600" then run RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile

[Shreewebs]

@Laurelai I have done but it seems to be an error

:/home/mastodon# RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile

[!] There was an error parsing Gemfile: no implicit conversion of Symbol into Integer. Bundler cannot continue.

# from /home/mastodon/Gemfile:4
# -------------------------------------------
# source 'https://rubygems.org'

ruby '>= 2.3.0', '< 2.6.0'
#
# -------------------------------------------

[Shreewebs]

Please assist!

[snowe2010]

@Shreewebs you have a typo somewhere.. run git status and make sure your changes are correct.