Twitter drops @replies from 140 character limit

Your tweets are about to get a little more spacious with Twitter's latest little tweak. Among a couple of other related changes, the social media giant announced on its blog that @usernames will no longer count towards your 140 character limit.

That simple change can potentially free up a ton of space for your tweets, especially if several @usernames are piled up at the beginning of a reply. As part of this move, Twitter is also making conversations easier to following by cleaning up readability in a few different ways. From Twitter:

  • Who you are replying to will appear above the Tweet text rather than within the Tweet text itself, so you have more characters to have conversations.
  • You can tap on "Replying to…" to easily see and control who's part of your conversation.
  • When reading a conversation, you'll actually see what people are saying, rather than seeing lots of @usernames at the start of a Tweet.

All of this is an extension of efforts that began last year to help people make more use of Twitter's signature character constraint. In September of 2016, the social network took a big step towards that goal by removing media, quotes and polls from the 140 character limit.

Twitter says these changes are rolling out now to the web and its Android and iOS apps. While there's no mention of the Windows app in its blog post, Twitter has done a pretty good job of keeping it updated with new features. We'll likely see the necessary interface updates roll out on Windows 10 PC and Mobile before too long.

Download Twitter from the Windows Store (opens in new tab)

Dan Thorp-Lancaster

Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the former Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central, Android Central, and iMore as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter @DthorpL and Instagram @heyitsdtl

13 Comments
  • Nice!
  • Cool
  • It's going to be an adjustment.
  • Nice. They've done a great job lately of freeing up those 140 characters to give you more flexibility, without actually increasing the limit (which would be a bad thing).
  • Yeah anything above 140 ch would be changing the whole concept of what twitter built its foundation on
  • Thank you! Finally Twitter!
  • About time! I was seriously fed up not being able to reply to some posts due to all the people in the reply chain.
  • Right...lol
  • Hope they fix the mentioned push notifications for the mobile app. Push works for everything else but that which is most important :/
  • This is great news. Fixing the 140 w/out unleashing long rants.
  • It looks kinda good on the web version, but a total mess on Android. Also it broke certain third-party apps' timelines as they still don't have the "Replying to" reference. I hope the Windows team doesn't update our app so soon, or at least get it right. :')
  • Yeah nice. But what about location? Just give it to us. By the way ..... I love to twitter......
  • This should make the Great Baboon happy. Now he will be able to fire more letters back at someone when attacking them with gibberish. Great way to set policies in place too by the way.