@bkuhn
Mastodon still displays long posts from other platforms with longer limits (1500 on my Hometown, 3000 on my Misskey). I would guess it's probably the same with account bios?

If you have a doubt, it's possible to extend it with a pinned #introduction post, which will stay right after the bio and get seen by people who visit your profile.

@TerryHancock

Yeah, I do have stuff of importance in pinned posts already. But ultimately I suspect that a lot of people stop reading at the end of the bio.

What fascinated me and led me to ask was that Tusky (which AFAIK is a Mastodon-specific client) let me edit the bio past 500 chars, and the web client does not.

I see posts from non-Mastodon ActivityPub implementations that do display with "Read more" in Mastodon, but never seen that in a bio (yet). My > 500 char bio displays in full.

@bkuhn @TerryHancock Glad to see I'm not the only one that noticed that. I had written up a somewhat lengthy bio in #Tusky, then a few months later, wanted to tweak it on the desktop web client. Got a complaint upon trying to save about the 500-character limit. Presumably it was just a client-side restriction, since the existing bio displayed in full.

But I didn't want to wrestle with it, so I just pared down my bio to less than 500 characters.

@aspensmonster

It's not really a client bug per se, since #Mastodon philosophy is to keep the 500 char limit for everything (which I fully support, as one of the big reasons I enjoy #Fediverse (which we all once upon a time called #microblog-ing, remeber?) is that it helps me practice concision in my writing — a skill I struggle with.

I think it's just a UI bug on both sides: #Tusky should warn but not stop you at 500, & web client should indicate you have to edit with a different client.