Yesterday I deployed the #GlitchSoc fork instead of the pure Mastodon. The main reason is the configurable post character limit. I am not a huge talker, but my wife is, and the limit was holding her back from posting here more.
In fact I don't understand why there is such limit and then there is also whole thread mechanism to workaround the limit in very uncomfortable way. It feels stupid to me and I would vote to have this configurable also in Mastodon upstream... Let instance admins decide if they want short posts.