Skip to main content


Mastodon character limit is such a weird concept and useless and pointless I can't believe is still there. People who want to say more than a paragraph need to split it into "threads"...insane!

Look:

How the fuck you get to read and interact with a post divided into tens of comments.....

This is silly as fuck people.

If you have no character limit, guess what, you can still make short posts. But not vice-versa.

It is beyond me why this is still a thing in 2025. Artificial limitations.

Man I LOVE Friendica! A proper way to make posts and interact with people. And yet not many are aware of Friendica and how awesome it is.

@Meredith Whittaker you should either move to a Mastodon instance without character limitation or try Friendca. You can even use our node social.trom.tf - and that's for anyone else who is bothered by this artificial limitation of Mastodon.

#fedi #fediverse #mastodon #friendica

in reply to Tio

maybe because limits have some benefits: it is interesting finding ways to express ideas in concise way. Also makes messages clearer for readers when things are short.
But my mastodon instance in particular have very high limit set, basically unlimited ☺️ So I believe its a choice to limit or not by instance admin.
in reply to Mindaugas

@mindaugas @Tio i agree that it can be beneficial sometimes to express an idea in short. However as in the case of the post from Meredith Whittaker it would be nicer if it would be in 1 long post. But if an admin can extend the post size limit in Mastodon then that's a cool feature :)
in reply to aaron

@aaron
"if an admin can extend the post size limit in Mastodon then that's a cool feature"

I learned it is not a feature to extend post size limit in Mastodon, but a hardcoded value in code, which is very difficult to change depending on deployment method, but possible. They should make this a feature.

And talking about friendica, it looks outdated (the original theme), which does not provide overall confidence, if comparing to new highly extensible, innovative and beautiful bonfire (for example, a flavor of it for scientists: openscience.network/)

in reply to Mindaugas

I think the main theme was updated recently...we also have our custom ones trom.tf/social/ and others made some that look like a more modern version of facebook gitlab.com/randompenguin/bookf…
in reply to Mindaugas

I've heard this argument that it may force people to be more concise...idk if true, I've seen many silly short posts, maybe it incentivizes to post a lot more just because you need to make short posts only. In any case users should have control over this when they want to make big posts. Else they end up posting a massive thread of posts basically, which is super hard to follow and engage with. Terrible.
in reply to Tio

the Mastodon instance can configure the character limit to be longer. It is so annoying to tell people who have never tried Mastodon before that you should check the character limits on the instance you choose to join because that could make your life easier or harder if you like writing long posts. Yet another inconsistency that people have to be aware about which complicates use of the software.

The Mastodon software should have a million character limit and instead offer a separate window in which to view long posts, and otherwise only show the first paragraph by default.

in reply to Ramin Honary

@ramin_hal9001
Yeah I don't like the fact that my Mastodon instance has a character limit. But I also have an account on Friendica to post long stuff when I want to, so that's how I manage.....
in reply to Tio

@Tio @Meredith Whittaker Yeah, as a neurodiverse person I really struggle to read long "threaded" posts. Something about the UI visual divisions causes my working memory to stack dump as I move between each chunk, making it take 4X as long for me to read it and to lose context badly. My brain over here trying to hold each post in working memory like the "why cant i hold all these limes" guy meme. πŸ˜† It's miserable.

Rokosun reshared this.

in reply to Tio

One thing I use Mastodon for is #WatchParty joinfediverse.wiki/Watch_party

e.g. following & posting "live" to hashtags like #Monsterdon while watching a film

I asked #Mastodon if #Fediverse platforms like #Friendica, #Sharkey were suitable for that but didn't get an answer

I created a Sharkey account & found out no, no good for watch parties (you can put hashtags in "antennas" but that only gives you a tiny, random-seeming selection of posts with the tags)

What about Friendica?

in reply to klu9

It totally depends how connected with the rest of the Friendica that node is....that's all it matters. You can try our instance social.trom.tf and see how it goes.
⇧