After recently being spotted testing a way to share longer text, Threads, a competitor to META’s X, is now officially rolling out the feature, allowing users to attach up to 10,000 characters of text to their posts. The addition was designed with creators’ needs in mind, as it supports linking to content outside of threads, such as newsletters, blogs, podcasts, and more.
Prior to this update, threads supported 500 characters—which is already far more than the 280 characters offered to unverified X users. However, X in 2023 introduced a way for its paid subscribers to publish up to 25,000 characters, hoping to encourage creators to publish their content directly on its platform.
Meanwhile, Meta isn’t going that far. Instead, the company says the 10,000 characters give people more space to express themselves, but also allow them to promote their work and reach others “wherever they live,” even if they’re not in the threads.
Before launch, Meta noticed that people were using screenshots to share longer content from books, articles, newsletters, podcast transcripts, and more, which inspired the addition and design of the feature.
The company found that its users often wanted to point people to the original work or where to buy their own work after starting a conversation about it in threads. For example, authors might want to share text from an upcoming book to drive pre-orders, while journalists might want to promote one of their longer features.
In X, users have long worked around character count limitations, threading and numbering a series of linked posts to share longer thoughts or uploading screenshots from an app like Apple Notes. Seeing this trend, X attempted to capitalize on the demand for a longer character count by making it a paid feature.
Threads, however, are making their additional characters available for free.
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The company confirmed to TechCrunch that it currently has no plans to monetize posts with text attachments. Additionally, Meta noted that text in posts can be formatted with highlighted, bold, or underlined text, strikethroughs, and italics. You can even add emojis.
The company says it is also exploring additional enhancements based on community feedback.
Notably, Meta says if creators link to content outside of threads, that link will be “prominently” displayed in the attachment for the public to click. This is also a photo in X, which has changed its user interface to minimize the visibility of links and often blocks links to external services at the whim of owner Elon Musk.
There are some disadvantages to using the longer text of threads.
Content in text attachments will not be indexed by search engines like Google and will not be federated. The latter refers to how Threads supports publishing your posts to the open social web, including decentralized services like Mastodon. This support allows Threads users to search for and follow users on other servers, see who follows you and who liked your post on those servers, and see and like posts in Threads published by users on other servers.
Meta says it is exploring how to federate longer text attachments for future iterations.
