Threads, Meta’s competitor to X, is now officially rolling out a feature that allows users to attach up to 10,000 characters of text to a post. This follows a period of testing where the functionality was spotted. The addition has been designed with the needs of creators in mind, as it supports linking out to external content like newsletters, blogs, and podcasts.
Prior to this update, Threads supported 500 characters, which was already more than the 280 characters offered to X’s unverified users. In 2023, X introduced a way for its paid subscribers to post up to 25,000 characters, hoping to encourage creators to publish content directly on its platform.
Meta is not going quite that far. The company states that 10,000 characters gives people more room for expression while also allowing them to promote their work and drive traffic to wherever it lives, even if that is not on Threads itself.
Ahead of the launch, Meta observed users sharing screenshots of longer content from books, articles, newsletters, and podcast transcripts. This trend inspired the new feature’s design. The company noticed that users often wanted to point people to the original work or a place to make a purchase after starting a conversation on Threads. For example, authors might share text from an upcoming book to drive preorders, while journalists could promote a longer feature.
On X, users have historically worked around character limits by threading a series of numbered posts or by uploading screenshots from apps like Apple Notes. Seeing this trend, X tried to capitalize on the demand by making longer character counts a paid feature. Threads, however, is making its additional characters available for free.
The company confirmed it does not have plans to monetize posts with text attachments at this time. Text in the posts can be formatted with highlighting, bold or underlined text, strikethroughs, and italics. Users can also add emojis. Meta says it is exploring additional enhancements based on community feedback.
Notably, Meta says if creators link 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 the visibility of links and has been known to block links to outside services at owner Elon Musk’s direction.
There are some drawbacks to using Threads’ longer text. The content in the text attachments will not be indexed by search engines like Google, and it will not be federated. Federation 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, see who follows them from those servers, and interact with posts from users on other servers. Meta says it is exploring how to federate the longer text attachments in future iterations.