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Remember when Twitter doubled its initial 140-character limit? Text limitations have become a key part of keeping social posts quick and easy to read, but that's not stopping some services changing their rules.
Threads, Meta’s Twitter-like social app, launched with a 500-character limit on all posts. That limit remains in place, but it has now introduced a new feature to help you expand on your posts in a similar way to attaching a photo or video.
A new Text Attachments feature is available now, and it allows you to send messages up to 10,000 characters long. These attachments aren't entirely visible in the main feed, and they instead appear as additional media that can expanded if you want to read it all.
If you’re drafting a post on Threads, you’ll now see a notepad icon between the GIF and More buttons. Pressing here will then allow you to start drafting your post, or you can paste text from another platform. The text editor is simplistic, but it allows you to turn on bold, italics, underlining or strikethroughs.
(Credit: Meta)You can also include links in the post itself, rather than in the Text Attachment. Meta’s own blog post notes how this may be helpful for writers or other creatives who want to use this feature as a way to preview longer posts.
If you’ve given your followers a tease of what you're writing, you can then link out for them to read the full thing. Meta says, “This gives people more room to express themselves and start conversations — and helps their community discover their work wherever it lives.”
Meta's idea here is a middle ground to help users express themselves further in their posts without making your Threads feed harder to navigate. This should allow you to write over 1,500 words in your posts to expand on your points further.
Why do social media services have character limits in the first place? Twitter’s original limit was set at 140 characters for the main post, with 20 characters reserved for the username. This was inspired by the limit on SMS messages, which was set at 160 characters. That limitation was first introduced by German inventor Friedhelm Hillebrand who believed most communication could be summed up in short messages.