Twitter Blue subscribers now have a 10,000 character limit

Twitter Blue subscribers now have a maximum tweet length of 10,000 characters and support for bold and italic text formatting. The announcement comes just weeks after the character limit for Twitter Blue was first bumped up from 280 characters to 4,000 back in February, with the latest increase and additional formatting features seemingly designed to help Twitter compete with newsletter platforms like Substack — which has recently found itself in Elon Musk’s crosshairs.

This isn’t the first time Twitter has introduced long-form writing features. The company — under previous leadership — was testing a new Notes feature for writers and had previously purchased the Revue newsletter firm in 2021, which served as a rival to Substack. Both of those programs were later scrapped by Musk.

Twitter isn’t being subtle about its intentions to rival services like Substack. The company recently rebranded its “Super Follows” feature — which allows users to subscribe to individual accounts to access exclusive content — to “Subscriptions,” advertising it alongside the new character limit and formatting options as a means for creators to earn income directly through Twitter. Musk also promised that Twitter wouldn’t be taking any money creators make through subscriptions for the next twelve months. Monetization through Subscriptions is currently only available to users in the US.

Attempting to entice creators with shiny new tools and attractive monetization terms is less hostile than Twitter’s recent attempts to undermine rival platforms. Last week, Twitter started to block Substack users from embedding tweets into their stories, later blocking almost all engagement on tweets containing links to Substack and flagging them as “potentially spammy or unsafe.” A few days later, Twitter walked back its throttling while Substack introduced a new Notes feature that added Twitter-like elements to the service.

Twitter has an uphill battle to fight if it wants to shirk its legacy as a short-form blogging platform. While some creators have expressed an interest in the new long-form features, many everyday Twitter users appear reluctant to read beyond the platform’s text snippets. Data reported by The Information also indicates that Twitter Blue is struggling to attract subscribers, with the service estimated to have around 290,000 global subscribers: just 0.1 percent of the roughly 250 million daily active users reported by Twitter last year.