This post is as much a note to myself as it is to share with others doing self-hosted Fediverse applications. I decided to migrate to the glitch-soc soft fork of Mastodon to increase the toot character maximum length and benefit from threading and other glitch enhancements. I needed to update my docker-compose and also figure out how to change the character limit if I was successful.

First, it is very easy to switch back and forth between stock Mastodon and the glitch-soc version. If you are using docker-compose you can simply open it in your editor and change the image options for the web, streaming, and sidekiq services to point to the glitch-soc repository.

  web:                     
 #   build: .              
    image: ghcr.io/glitch-soc/mastodon:latest
   # image: ghcr.io/mastodon/mastodon:v4.3.3

---

  streaming:
    # You can uncomment the following lines if you want to not use the prebuilt image, for example if you have local code changes
    # build:
    #   dockerfile: ./streaming/Dockerfile
    #   context: .
    image: ghcr.io/glitch-soc/mastodon-streaming:latest
#    image: ghcr.io/mastodon/mastodon-streaming:v4.3.3

---

  sidekiq:
#    build: .
#    image: ghcr.io/mastodon/mastodon:v4.3.3
    image: ghcr.io/glitch-soc/mastodon:latest

If you try to start docker though, you will get error message about “NoMethod” from one or more services as you haven’t done the database migration step yet. From the folder with your docker-compose.yml file you then need to run: ‘docker-compose run –rm web rails db:migrate’ to update the database to be “glitch-soc” compatible.

Lastly, despite everyone asking for it, the settings for post legnth, bio legnth, etc. are still not in the GUI configuration tool. You can read .env.production.sample for all variables, but most importantly you want to add MAX_TOOT_CHARS=#### and MAX_BIO_CHARS=#### to your .env.production file.