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This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)
in reply to Jari S.

mä luulen että suurimmat syyt on nykyisen instanssin ongelmat (admin päättäny sulkea, tai lopettanut moderoimisen/päivittämisen) tai sit siirrytään isoilta omanlaisille kun on oltu tarpeeks kauan fedissä että ymmärretään mitä se tarkoittaa.
in reply to aqunt

in reply to Roni Rolle Laukkarinen

mentions common reasons for people to switch to Memento Mori:
1. The 10,000-character limit on posts.
2. Themes, accessibility, and other software tweaks.
3. Poor experiences with admins of other instances.

When Rolle wrote about his social anxiety on Saturday (mementomori.social/@rolle/1159…), following our conference call on Thursday, and did so in a single, long toot, I found myself thinking again about the pros and cons of character limits higher than Mastodon's default 500.

1/3

in reply to Jos Schuurmans (EN)

My impulse was that I wanted to reply in a single toot as well. Why? Rolle's longer-than-default post felt nicely self-contained. I thought that a thread of replies would feel fragmented.

Character limits have been discussed exhaustively over the years. On a freshly installed Mastodon instance, the default limit for toots and replies is 500 characters. Instance administrators can change this setting, though.

2/3

in reply to Jos Schuurmans (EN)

That 500-character limit encourages users to keep each post to a single thought, which makes the “river of news” easier to scan, digest, and respond to. It also makes it simpler to reply to a specific paragraph within a longer story, or to fork a discussion around that single point.

Out of curiosity (and apologies as this must be a question you’ve answered many times before): @rolle, what were the main pros and cons that led you to choose a 10,000-character limit?

3/3

in reply to Jos Schuurmans (EN)

No apologies needed, great question.

Honestly, because I like to write and not limit myself. I also dislike threading; I never write them. I enjoy writing and reading. And, simply, because I can.

I've always kind of disliked Twitter's original 140-character limit, I think it came from SMS restrictions back in 2006. People used to say it was great because it forced brevity and creativity, but I always found it frustrating to chop my messages into pieces. I like to write full thoughts, like blog posts, and make my case properly. I was glad when they extended it to 160 and finally 280. Mastodon's default 500 was an improvement, but still not enough.

There are really no downsides. Clients show a "read more" option anyway, so readers can choose whether or not to expand long posts.

in reply to Roni Rolle Laukkarinen

What irritates and frustrates me most about this whole limitation is that writing in different languages ​​requires different amounts of characters to achieve the same thing. For example, I can write much more content in English than in German, Finnish or any other languages from the so called slavic group.

Btw.. it seems that the option that allowed for more characters in a reply (depending on the length of the first post in the thread) has completely disappeared.

@josschuurmans

This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)
in reply to Roni Rolle Laukkarinen

I don't like the chopping either, especially the manual pagination, and especially on mobile. It's cumbersome. And your point about "read more" is valid, as it keeps the visible part digestible in a feed.

The 10,000 chars. limit gives the user more choice and with it more responsibility. It requires some self-discipline and effort to write top-down (the "inverted pyramid" in news reporting), to keep the bit above the fold ("read less") easy to scan. If one values such things.

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in reply to Jos Schuurmans (EN)

Why then are higher character limits not more widely adopted? Are you sure there are no other downsides? Technically, for example, is it trivial in terms of server resources?

Since your instance is the perfect test bed, have you shared behavioural data? What are the average and median toot lengths on Memento Mori? What qualitative feedback do you get? Does it change the user experience: the way people read and write? Does anyone ever want to go back to a lower character limit?

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in reply to Jos Schuurmans (EN)

There shouldn't be any technical downsides, it's just text. The limits are completely artificial. As far as I know, it could even be 99 999 characters. I've heard that the academic instance qoto.org allows 65 535 (64k) characters.

"Why then are higher character limits not more widely adopted?"

I think someone from the Mastodon GmbH decided that 500 is a good standard for a microblogging platform so it wouldn't become a full blogging platform. Also, admins generally prefer not to fork or modify their instance, they like sticking close to the main core code.

I haven't looked into any behavior data, so this is just guesswork: from what I've seen, people still keep their posts relatively short, I'd say the average on our instance is around 300-600 characters.

"Does anyone ever want to go back to a lower character limit?"

No evidence of that. Why would anyone want to? 😅

Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source
zotheca
It's not about comparison.
It's about the development of social media platforms, and Twitter was part of that history, while Mastodon positioned itself as an alternative at the time. In this respect, it's important to understand that Mastodon's apparent limitations were not limitations at the time, but rather extensions.
Not from a Fediverse context, since the projects before Mastodon already knew more characters, but from the explicit application area of being a Twitter alternative.
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source
Jos Schuurmans (EN)
Is that anymore a valid consideration? Twitter as a benchmark? Or even the concept of a messaging or microblogging service? If I follow @rolle's reasoning about the 10,000 character limit, perhaps the whole distinction between a blog, a microblog and a short message service has declined in relevance.
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)