Maybe. I use Dvorak for real keyboards and QWERTY on my phone. I tried Dvorak on my phone and didn’t see any benefit.

Heliboard offers the option. The ideal layout for a small onscreen keyboard may be rather different from one for typing with all your fingers though.

We need root on our car computers.

The AI thing I’d really like is an on-device classifier that decides with reasonably high reliability whether I would want my phone to interrupt me with a given notification or not. I already don’t allow useless notifications, but a message from a friend might be a question about something urgent, or a cat picture.

What I don’t want is:

• Ways to make fake photographs
• Summaries of messages I could just skim the old fashioned way
• Easier access to LLM chatbots

It seems like those are the main AI features bundled on phones now, and I have no use for any of them.

it’s as simple as editing a single config file

It isn’t. Mastodon has a character limit hardcoded in two places. Critically, that’s not a limit on what it can receive and display, just on what local users can post. With Bluesky, it’s part of a schema that would be enforced on posts from elsewhere, if anybody was actually running a Bluesky-compatible appview in the wild.

There is a chance that I just don’t get microblogging. I’ve always felt that short character limits encourage people to make bad points that resonate emotionally but fall apart when thought through, and to yell at people they disagree with rather than being thoughtful.

I think the idea that forced brevity is an important component of microblogging is mistaken. Low friction to post, minimal formatting, and (optionally) collapsed long posts in feeds all encourage short posts without requiring them.

It might have served more of a purpose when Twitter launched because people weren’t in the habit of short text posts at the time, and because Twitter supported posting via SMS.

I don’t see value in a character limit other than whatever might be needed for technical reasons. Bluesky allows alt text for images to be 2000 characters, so clearly any technical limitations allow at least that much.

For those who prefer short text posts, hiding posts longer than a user-configurable setting behind a “see more” link would do.

Yet they still think it’s a good idea to limit text posts to 300 characters for reasons I cannot fathom.