Write once, check everywhere. X weighs emoji and links, Threads counts emoji in bytes, Bluesky counts what you see. Type or paste your post and every platform's meter moves as you go.
Limits as of October 2026. How each platform counts
A “character” means something different on every platform, which is why one counter number is never enough. These are the limits and rules this page uses, as of October 2026.
| Platform | Limit | How it is counted |
|---|---|---|
| X post | 280 | Weighted: most Latin letters count 1, CJK characters and emoji 2, every link 23. Longer posts need an X Premium subscription; 280 is the standard limit. |
| Threads post | 500 | Characters as you see them, but each emoji counts its UTF-8 bytes (4 or more). Links: at most 5. Topic tags: at most 1. Only one topic tag is used per post. |
| Bluesky post | 300 | Characters as you see them (graphemes); the app shortens long links before counting. |
| Mastodon post | 500 | Characters as you see them; every link counts 23 and @name@server counts only @name. 500 is the default; each server can set its own limit. |
| LinkedIn post | 3,000 | Counted cautiously in UTF-16 code units: most emoji count 2. |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 | Counted cautiously in UTF-16 code units: most emoji count 2. Hashtags: at most 5. @ mentions: at most 20. Instagram cut hashtags from 30 to 5 per post or reel from December 2025. |
| YouTube video title | 100 | Counted cautiously in UTF-16 code units; one line, no angle brackets. Titles are one line and YouTube refuses the characters < and >. |
X counts with the rules in its open-source twitter-text library. Most Latin-script letters, digits and common punctuation weigh 1. Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters weigh 2, and every emoji weighs 2 however many code points it is built from, so a family emoji costs the same as a smiley. Any link counts as 23, because X wraps it in its t.co short link. Text is normalised first, so an accented letter typed as two code points still counts once. One surprise: the single ellipsis character (…) weighs 2, while three full stops weigh 3.
Threads allows 500 characters, but Meta's developer documentation says emoji are counted by their UTF-8 size. A plain smiley costs 4, a thumbs-up with a skin tone 8, and a four-person family 25. A post may hold at most 5 links and only one topic tag.
Bluesky allows 300 graphemes, the characters as you see them on screen. The app shortens a long link to its domain and the first 13 characters of its path followed by “...”, and counts that shorter form, so a long link costs far less than its full length.
Mastodon servers allow 500 characters unless the admins chose otherwise, so set your server's limit above. Links always count 23, and a mention of someone on another server, like @maya@example.social, counts only the @maya part. A content warning counts towards the same limit.
These publish a limit but not a counting rule for emoji, so we count cautiously, the way a browser form does: most emoji count 2 and everything else 1. If the meter says it fits, it fits. Instagram also caps hashtags at 5 per post since December 2025 and @ mentions at 20, and YouTube titles are one line with no angle brackets.
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Open a temporary inboxX does not count characters one by one. Links always cost 23, emoji and Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters cost 2, and most Latin text costs 1. A plain counter that says 250 can be well over 280 on X if the post has emoji, or well under it if it has long links.
Meta's documentation says Threads counts an emoji by its size in UTF-8 bytes. A simple emoji is 4 bytes, and emoji built from several pieces, like skin tones, flags or families, are 8 to 25 or more. Ten family emoji alone would use half of a 500-character post.
It marks the text that falls past the limit of the platform you pick under the box, counted by that platform's rules. Everything before the highlight fits. Pick another platform to see where its limit falls.
No. The counting happens in your browser and nothing you type is uploaded. Your draft is kept in this browser's local storage so it survives a reload; the Clear button removes it.
They were checked against each platform's own documentation in October 2026, and the sources are listed on this page. Platforms do change their limits, as Instagram did with hashtags in December 2025, so if a number looks wrong, the platform's help pages have the final word.