How to increase character limit of a toot

[masto77]

Hi can anyone help me with how to increase the character limit of a foot on mastodon ? I have googled so many but none of them come with a clear simple way to get this done

[girish]

This is not possible without changing the code. I think it's set to 500. See https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/t/howto-raise-the-character-limit/763, https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/1446 (wontfix) and https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12223

[timconsidine]

@masto77 if your instance's toots are longer than the standard, would this not cause a problem with federation features, 'outgoing' and possibly 'incoming' ?

[subven]

The best advice so far:

What if I go over the character limit?
Don't worry. First, you can't; Mastodon won't let you post a toot over the instance's character limit. You won't get in trouble or anything.
If you find that what you want to say is too long for a single toot, or if you think of something else after you've posted a toot, you can reply to your own toot. Mastodon supports toot threads, so you can toot as many times as you want to, replying to each toot in sequence, and the whole series will show up when someone clicks on any of the toots in the thread.
So if your toot is too long, just split it up and make the second half a reply to the first; if you think of something else later, just reply to your original toot and the reply will show up whenever anyone clicks on the original toot.

[masto77]

@subven

thanks

[jdaviescoates]

@timconsidine said in How to increase character limit of a toot:

@masto77 if your instance's toots are longer than the standard, would this not cause a problem with federation features, 'outgoing' and possibly 'incoming' ?

I'm not sure, but I've seen plenty of people who are on instances that have MUCH higher character limits (like nearly 50k!) so I don't think it's really that much of an issue.

But I guess those people are running forks of the Mastodon code like Glitch

https://glitch-soc.github.io/docs/

[dsnradio]

There is a way to increase the character limit, but as the system is read-only (why do that cloudron?) there is no way of doing it.

[girish]

@dsnradio We do that to prevent source code from being changed either intentionally (user) or malicously (hacker). For the former case, it's to make sure apps can be updated reliably. For the latter, it's for security.

If you want to modify an app , you can build the package yourself - https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/mastodon-app/ and do whatever changes. Of course, you have to take care of updates as well for the custom installation.