After recently being spotted testing a way to share longer text, Threads, Meta’s X competitor, is now officially rolling out the feature that allows users to attach up to 10,000 characters of text to their post. The addition has been designed with the needs of creators in mind, as it supports linking out to content outside of Threads, like newsletters, blogs, podcasts, and more.
Before this update, Threads supported 500 characters — which is already far more than the 280 characters offered to X’s unverified users. However, X in 2023 introduced a way for its paid subscribers to post up to 25,000 characters, in the hopes of encouraging creators to publish their content directly on its platform.
Meta, meanwhile, isn’t going quite that far. Instead, the company says that the 10,000 characters give people more room to express themselves, but also allows them to promote their work and drive others to “wherever it lives,” even if not on Threads itself.
Ahead of the launch, Meta noticed that people were using screenshots to share longer content from books, articles, newsletters, podcast transcripts, and more, which inspired the feature’s addition and design.
The company saw that its users often wanted to point people to the original work or place to purchase their own work, after starting a conversation about the subject on Threads. For instance, authors may want to share text from an upcoming book to drive preorders, whereas journalists may want to promote one of their longer features.
On X, users have long worked around character count limitations by threading and numbering a series of linked posts to share longer thoughts, or by uploading screenshots from an app like Apple’s Notes. Seeing this trend, X tried to capitalize on the demand for a longer character count by making it a paid feature.
Threads, however, is making its additional characters available for free.
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The company confirmed to TechCrunch that it doesn’t have plans to monetize posts with text attachments at this time. Plus, Meta noted that text in the posts can be formatted with highlighting, bold or underlined text, strikethroughs, and italics. You can even add emojis.
The company says it’s exploring additional enhancements based on community feedback, as well.
Notably, Meta says if creators link out to content outside of Threads, that link will be displayed “prominently” in the attachment for the audience to click. This is also a shot at X, which changed its user interface to downplay links’ visibility, and often blocks links to outside services at owner Elon Musk’s whim.
There are some drawbacks to using Threads’ longer text, though.
The content in the text attachments won’t be indexed by search engines like Google, and it won’t be federated. The latter refers to how Threads supports the publication of its posts to the wider open social web, including decentralized services like Mastodon. This support allows Threads users to search for and follow users from other servers besides Threads, see who follows you and who liked your post from those servers, as well as see and like posts on Threads posted by users on other servers.
Meta says it’s exploring how to federate the longer text attachments for future iterations.
