would def need to have the show more to be included, -- could be a neat update if it increased when we get improved threading

As always, I vote for "let the user decide". If people want to write more, sure, go ahead. But everyone should get to decide how much they want to see as a max per-post as well. So if you write a lot, your post may just get cut off with a "(more)" button to those who don't want to see long posts.

As a counterpoint - I think all these are perhaps better solved by leaving the limits low, and implementing good threading/authoring, if this is indicated in the main timeline, a user can now click in if they're actually interested. This kind of gets all the same outcomes, but doesn't require changes to the core timeline experience and 'feel' of the app (there is a lot of friction in asking a user to interact to consume more content, a thread implies that'll be high-value, but an extra 200 chars...?).

There may be a compromise position - leave top-level posts alone, but allow 2nd/3rd posts by the author (authored at the same time as the thread) to be 500-1000 characters

As a counterpoint - I think all these are perhaps better solved by leaving the limits low, and implementing good threading/authoring, if this is indicated in the main timeline, a user can now click in if they're actually interested. This kind of gets all the same outcomes, but doesn't require changes to the core timeline experience and 'feel' of the app (there is a lot of friction in asking a user to interact to consume more content, a thread implies that'll be high-value, but an extra 200 chars...?).

Will absolutely be an improvement when we get the ability to post a thread with multiple posts at once

Will absolutely be an improvement when we get the ability to post a thread with multiple posts at once

FYI, I accidentally discovered 2 days ago that Mary's Skeetdeck already does this :)

In a thread, you can post up to 500 characters at a time. In Bluesky, it's inconvenient to post the same post in two or three separate posts. It would be nice to support 500 characters

bc posts can have keep the original part at 300, and then add the extra 200 after would also work but i do think 500 characters would be a huge qol improvement. i type a lot and often have to remove punctuation and spaces in longer posts if not the follow up is often only going to be 2-3 words.

Not opposed, but I think all we really need is a (show more) button, which obviates the need to limit content length at all.

I don't really have a strong opinion on how long the truncated/visible in the timeline/summary part of a post should be allowed to be. Most academic journals only allow 60 chars in a title (which I think is too short, but they get by), and most paper abstracts are longer than you'd want to display in your timeline on bsky so 🤷

Actually... why wouldn't you want abstract-length skeets? I feel like the length you want here comes down to how much you trust the algorithm. If you have a really freaking good algorithm you're going to want to read 90% of the abstracts in full.

At the same time, "leave it to users" kind of isn't a feasible policy, because post authors need to know how much of their post is going to show, there needs to be some standard.

Actually... why wouldn't you want abstract-length skeets? I feel like the length you want here comes down to how much you trust the algorithm. If you have a really freaking good algorithm you're going to want to read 90% of the abstracts in full.

Sounds dramatic, but I really think this is one of those small decisions that destroys the site or at least dramatically changes the tone.

It's a microblogging platform, and that has a kind of social 'feel' - that's why I'd advocate for good threading, but a clear 'cut off' at 300 characters (i.e. that stuff treated as the 2nd thread item) to continue to encourage a readable timeline. "Read more" I think will encourage an unreadable timeline - snippet, snippet, snippet, etc.; vs. a catchy 300 characters, with more data below.

(But going up to 500 doesn't seem like it would have the same impact, but it's a creep up, so it's a tricky design question - constraints contribute so much to the overall experience.)

Not opposed, but I think all we really need is a (show more) button, which obviates the need to limit content length at all.

I don't really have a strong opinion on how long the truncated/visible in the timeline/summary part of a post should be allowed to be. Most academic journals only allow 60 chars in a title (which I think is too short, but they get by), and most paper abstracts are longer than you'd want to display in your timeline on bsky so 🤷

Actually... why wouldn't you want abstract-length skeets? I feel like the length you want here comes down to how much you trust the algorithm. If you have a really freaking good algorithm you're going to want to read 90% of the abstracts in full.

At the same time, "leave it to users" kind of isn't a feasible policy, because post authors need to know how much of their post is going to show, there needs to be some standard.

The standard is 300 chars. It can be assumed that most people won't change from the default, and any that set it to less than that understand that they'll be seeing a lot of "show more" and deliberately want that.

I wanted to add with how long some fediverse and nostr usernames are like over 50 characters... it takes up so much space
and leaves a little room for actual post.

https://bsky.app/profile/surfdude29.ispost.ing/post/3kzidy5nnvv24

I think we are very very unlikely to make a change like this. Having a character limit is a creative obstruction and a core part of the microblogging "modality" and form of media. Having longer-form content show up in-line changes the dynamics. It is totally fine and expected that folks will link out to longer form posts. It is also totally fine an expected that folks will build alternative modalities and experiment in the network with different obstructions.

As some history, we already bumped the character limit in early days of the app; the current 300 char limit wasn't just a randomly arrived at number, it is an iteration arrived at from feedback.

Similar to the Nostr example shared by Monica, could there be some kind of compromise when we @mention people? Can the username handles be taken out of the character count? The native ".bsky.social" takes up a lot of space. I have another idea coming about username handles, but I thought this particular point was also relevant here.

Similar to the Nostr example shared by Monica, could there be some kind of compromise when we @mention people? Can the username handles be taken out of the character count? The native ".bsky.social" takes up a lot of space. I have another idea coming about username handles, but I thought this particular point was also relevant here.

The way this works for links is that they are shortened client-side, with the full URL in the facet, so the same way, the client could potentially do something like that with Nostr mentions, leaving them as "@npub1qweqweqwe..." in the post text (first n letters + "...") - it's not like anyone can tell them one from the other by the npub :D

I'd argue that even the concept of 'a socially responsible microblogging site' is inherently flawed because microblogging isn't socially responsible.

It's been shown that microblogging negatively affects the ability to hold complex thoughts. This is demonstrated in Jiang, et. al.'s paper "Does microblogging make us "shallow"? Sharing information online interferes with information comprehension. .

An empathetic and socially responsible society generally relies on understanding nuance and having a high comprehension of society as we see in Martingano et. al.'s paper "How cognitive and emotional empathy relate to rational thinking: empirical evidence and meta-analysis..

Conversely, bigotry often relies on gross over-simplification, such as "my people good, other people bad" and then various 'banner-calls' of 'my people' vs 'their people'.

By forcing low character limits, people are automatically pushed towards a lack of nuance which leads to a lack of understanding which leads to a lack of empathy.

To ironically put it simply and reductive for those of us already negatively affected:

Short posts = become bigoted & dumb
Long posts = become empathetic & smart

As a public good corporation, Bluesky has a moral obligation to allow for longer form posts. I'd readily argue that 500 characters isn't enough. Now, maybe a compromise could be made, like having both forms, and allowing people to repost snippets of other posts, and having a different designation between twitter-like posts and reddit-like posts, but the capacity for long post should be there.

This is the number one reason I don't use Bluesky that much. As a social media user with multiple platforms, it's tiring having to re-write all the posts specifically for Bluesky. Mastodon and Threads both default to 500. The 300 character limit also causes issues in cross posting tools and bridges.

I know I've posted in this thread before and shared my opinions already, but today I made a couple short posts (or it was supposed to be short in my head, anyway) and they all reached about 320~350 characters. I did the usual rearranging of the words to fit into the limitation without compromising spelling and meaning but I really didn't like the experience of being blocked due to a couple dozen characters constantly. This seems like it's not much, but it really wears me down and makes me not want to post on Bluesky that much, just passively look at others' posts.

The time I spend reducing 10 or 20 characters in the post is time spent not interacting or reading others' posts.

In other words the limit's starting to negatively affect my user experience. I strongly urge this increase be implemented, if possible, or to consider it seriously since it's been more than 1 year this thread's been opened

EDIT: Considering the post under mine, it is difficult to be happy for verified news outlets joining Bluesky if they too are limited by this cap. If we as a community want serious journalists to join then we should give them better tools for better communication of ideas I think

I would agree more with wanting to keep the character limit as is if Bluesky was generally used for a more traditional, less serious kind of microblogging, but the fact is that a very good chunk of the Bluesky user base are often not using it for that kind of microblogging; they're often trying to have actual serious discussions about serious issues, which (as evident by what Twitter ended up becoming) often results in a lot of really toxic and unproductive posting with a low character limit. Sure, people could just start using services that offer posts with a larger/unlimited character limit (which I do hope we see a lot of since I just find most long threads to look really ugly) and have more productive conversations there, but I honestly think it's possible that a lot of people might be so into that toxic argumentative breed of microblogging that they don't really want or care to do so.

If you want to have less toxicity and more healthy discussion while still preserving the microblogging format then raising the character limit to 500, while it wouldn't fix the problem entirely, would be better than insisting on staying at 300, since it's not like 500 is even that much larger.

Especially with people trying to spread important information, having to put key details in another post just is not conducive and only increases the amount of misinformation that can happen because of these ultra bite sized stuff. It makes it difficult to communicate with nuance.

Also trying to content warn, which is beneficial for everyone, or use hashtags which is vital for visibility as a new account, means sacrificing a lot of the actual content of the message.

Even providing seperate fields without a general character limit count would help a lot.

It seems that many people use Bluesky together with Mastodon and Twitter. I understand that Mastodon's default character limit is 500 characters. For interoperability, it would be great if Bluesky's limit could also be extended to 500 characters.

As a side note, the 300 character limit is anglocentric.

It's significantly more difficult to fit a (single!) nuanced thought into that space in e.g. German. (We're seeing less of that in the Crowdin because UI-German is terse, but that does not apply to user content as being kind admittedly often requires a little more space in this language. The current limit is affecting both tone and nuance 😒)

If I'm not mistaken, many other European languages have a similar issue.

Here's what I propose, as a holistic solution:

• Create a new lexicon for a 500 grapheme-long post modeled after app.bsky.feed.post with a different name. It could be app.bsky.feed.microblogPost to be more generic and show some intent to better interoperate with Mastodon (which also uses 500 chars), or it could be app.bsky.feed.post.v2, or whatever else. Everything would be the same about the post except it would allow 500 characters.
• All new posts will use the new lexicon. (Is there a way to turn off the ability to create posts through the API with the old lexicon? Idk if it's that important, just curious.)
• Posts with the old lexicon cannot be edited to have more than 300 chars
• Allow users to set the default length of posts in the UI. If they choose 300, all posts longer than that in feeds will be truncated with an ellipsis and a button to "See more". This keeps post length in feeds smaller and more predictable if the user wants. Or they can just keep it at 500.
• The Bluesky app should be able to embed other text lexicons with a certain max length (maybe 2000 chars?) automatically by inspecting the lexicon for a text field, maybe with a certain name. This could also be a great opportunity to introduce the idea of lexicon "traits" @ngerikines (if the lexicon has a certain trait (hasDisplayableText or something) then Bluesky could show that text in its own style natively in the app. In this way, Bluesky could keep actual posts to 500 chars but automatically show text from embedded posts of other text-based lexicons. The biggest issue with this is moderation, but if Bluesky could find a nice way to apply moderation I think this would be a huge win for interoperability.

I would also like to support this, though frankly I'd want something more like 2000 characters then merely 500.

I would even pay money for an extended character limit: I hate having to remove nuance from my posts and it's particularly stressful since as someone with ASD, I often worry about being misconstrued or phrasing things correctly.

It is frankly ridiculous that the following is too long for bsky by over 100 characters. This is not a terribly complex thought, it's just more than one sentence.

Interesting from @sciam.bsky.social : the brain processes “this moment is awful” and “this life is meaningful” through linked-but-distinct circuits. Neurologically, well-being in parenting is about putting rough moments in a life-long perspective, not staying calm all the time. (Advice we've all heard, but it's cool to find neurological mechanisms underlying it.)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-neuroscience-behind-the-parenting-paradox-of-happiness/

Even if it's technically possible to trim enough characters to fit, that's an arduous amount of editing. It's no wonder I barely interact with this platform, the experience of trying to post this literally caused me to ragequit due to character constraints.

So much has been proposed and so much has been discussed, the majority of people in this thread have agreed that 300 is too small but even after a year and 5 months, there's no true update about it. I think it would be nice to at least get a definite answer on whether we will get this character limit update or not, or if this is even in the minds of the developers right now.

I think my core issue here[0] is that coming from ActivityPub, I'm used to everything being liberal in what it accepts and mostly interoperates even when each software is designed for a very different experience. I can make a post on a Wordpress blog (with ActivityPub plugin), tag a Lemmy (Reddit-like) community, and people who follow me from Mastodon (Twitter-like) and Wafrn (Tumblr-like) can all argue with each other in a common set of comments.

That doesn't work in AtProto land because software doesn't accept content that doesn't conform to its lexicon. In the short term, perhaps everything should create a version of every post that's acceptable to BlueSky because BlueSky is the 300-character gorilla of AtProto, but this approach does not lead to an ecosystem of interoperable software.

[0] Aside from generally thinking character limits are a misfeature

How about asking users for their opinions on the official Bluesky account?

1. Keep 300 characters
2. Expand to 500 characters

I think many users would probably choose option 2.

I stopped posting on BlueSky because of that dumb characters limit . I post album artworks which can be very complex with lot of details and symbolism that can't fit in 300 characters. Also if i see a post about a complex issue if I feel like it can't fit in 300 characters I simply don't bother interacting