Long Posting using Pinafore - Testing and worked.

I have been trying out different fedi clients, looking for how they feel, speed and features, ergonomics and design.

Really liked Pinafore, which is simple to setup (runs on a web browser window, similarly to the Mastodon web client).

Pinafore is well built, well designed, simple and elegant. I liked it much!

However, I hit a significant SNAG, and had mentioned it to other people, in local conversations here at qoto and in others with friends in other instances.

The problem is, when I am using Pinafore to access my Qoto account, which has a very large, 65,000 characters maximum per post limit, in Pinafore (and similarly in Tusky also) I can only use the 500 characters usual post limit. 😞

That is a show stopped for me, as I like to write Long Form and develop ideas. Argh.

A friend from another instance mentioned that she could use it on her instance, and it worked.

The main difference we could see is that she mentioned having 'glitchsoc' installed, which I am not sure we have here at qoto.

I created an account earlier today at another instance, (for different posting and a lower profile). Just now I made a post size limit test.

** Test conditions:

- acess via Pinafore web client.

- the new instance server allows a maximum of 10,000 characters.

** Test method:

- to avoid clogging the public feeds with something irrelevant, I sent myself a Direct Message, DM, which is a normal Toot, which has the privacy flag set to DM.

- the same usual size limits apply to DMs, same as regular posts.

** Test Results:

- Even as I entered the text I could see the counter in the Toot editor box started up with 10,000 chars.

- as I typed and later copy/pasted a large block of text, copied from one of my posts here, all thru this the Toot button was enabled, and the counter was decreasing.

- that indicated the input was accepted normally, if using the same Pinafore client with qoto, it would GREY out the Toot button, show an angry RED line at the bottom of the edit box.

- the screenshot attached here shows the characters left counter at about 8,600; which means my post was already at about 1,400 chars length.

I hit the send button, and it was delivered to my qoto DM inbox perfectly.

Sucess! 😄

Conclusion, there's something missing here, I believe what is enabling the outside clients to work properly is glitchsoc being installed, or not; or maybe a configuration problem.

The footer of the instance's web client shows this message:

"Glitchsoc is free open source software forked from Mastodon. You can contribute or report issues on GitHub at glitch-soc/mastodon (v2.9.2+glitch)."

...which might mean the whole server setup is a custom, forked version of mastodon, not an addon?

@freemo Could you look at this? can we have glitchsoc or is it a full rebuild and too much work (which I wouldn't expect, certainly)

@freemo I already found the answer, glitchsoc is a full separate version of Mastodon, with added experimental features.

Documentation here (for those curious to see what is different):
https://glitch-soc.github.io/docs/

It does have some nice enhancements, which I already noted on my very short experience there.

@design_RG Indeed!

@freemo Wishlist!

- Local Only toots.
-Bookmarks!!!
- their app settings is neat.