Feed: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
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Title: Threads posts now support 'text attachments' up to 10,000 characters

Link: https://www.engadget.com/social-media/threads...

That was fast. A week after a new feature for sharing long-form text was
spotted in the Threads app, Meta is making the experiment official. Threads
users will now be able to append text snippets of up to 10,000 characters to
their posts in a feature Meta says is meant to support journalists and
creators on the platform.

As Engadget detailed last week, the feature is fairly basic for now.
Selecting "text attachment" from the post composer opens up a simple text
editor that has some formatting options. Once published to Threads, text
attachments open either in a full-screen view on mobile or in a dedicated
window on threads.com. If the post contains a link, the text attachment will
also show a preview of the linked post at the end of text.

That's notable as Meta has been trying to make links shared on Threads more
prominent in an effort to give creators a boost on the platform. So far,
there have been mixed results. While data shows engagement with links has
been growing in recent months, Threads is sending very little traffic to
websites overall.

In a blog post, the company says the feature was inspired by user behavior as
people frequently share "screenshots of longer content from books, articles,
newsletters, podcast transcripts." The company also suggests that the feature
could be used by authors and journalists who wish to share previews of their
published works.

While the 10,000 character limit technically means that authors and
journalists could publish substantial amounts of writing directly on Threads,
text attachments lack many features you'd expect from publishing tools. There
are limited text formatting options, for example, and you can't embed media
or do much else to break up big chunks of text. (A Meta spokesperson says
highlighting and other formatting abilities are in the works.)

Text attachments also aren't compatible with sharing to the fediverse, so
followers from other ActivityPub services won't be able to see them even if
youΓÇÖve opted in to fediverse sharing. But many users will likely still find
the feature preferable to sharing lengthy multi-part Threads, which can be
hard to follow and don't always all appear in a single view in the app or
website.

Meta says the feature is still in its early days and that it plans to add
more functionality to text attachments in the future, along with more creator-
focused updates.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
https://www.engadget.com/social-media/threads...
attachments-up-to-10000-characters-170000305.html?src=rss

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