In 2014, as I was starting work on Micro.blog, I blogged about the properties of a microblog post, including the character length:
I picked 280 characters instead of App.net’s 256 characters because it’s slightly less nerdy, and feels right at exactly double Twitter’s 140. This should be thought of as more of a guideline than a rule, though — just something to shoot for.
After that, Twitter also doubled their character limit to 280 characters. Mastodon launched at 500 characters. In the years since, it has felt less symbolic for Micro.blog to stick to 280 characters. Thinking about a post-Twitter world, 280 actually now feels kind of wrong.
Micro.blog is based on real blogs, so you can have full-length blog posts with a title, categories, photos, inline links, podcasts, and anything else you’d expect blogs to have. Those full posts don’t have a limit. It’s the Micro.blog timeline that encourages the 280-character limit to make the timeline as readable as possible, not cluttered with long posts or “read more” links.
Today we’re making the next big change to how the timeline works: we’re “rounding up” the character limit to 300, and for short posts that contain a block quote, we’re doubling it to 600.
Unlike some social networks, Micro.blog’s character counter is for the text you will see in the final post. It strips out any Markdown or HTML tags when calculating the length, so there’s no extra cost to italic text or links. And with the 600 limit for quotes, it’s more consistent to use Micro.blog’s “Embed” link to paste in someone else’s post from the timeline and know it won’t be truncated.
This gives posts a little more room to breathe. The posts are still short enough that it’s not a significant change to the reading experience in the way that bumping it all the way to 500 would be. It feels right for Micro.blog.
Micro.blog on the web, the Mac app, Android app, and beta of Micro.blog 3.0 for iOS on TestFlight have all been updated with this new limit.
There’s still more to do. We plan to adopt this change for Micro.blog replies as well, which have always been treated differently than regular posts. Because that’s a more disruptive change, we’ll roll it out separately in the coming months. We have some ideas for improving the UI for long replies to tie replies back to your blog. That will take longer to get right.
Enjoy the extra 20 characters! Happy blogging.
Jason Becker can you explain a little more about the idea of "embed" and quoting? Does this mean, generally, if I add a block quote, that post has a 600 character total limit, but without a blockquote it's 300? Or is there something more complex than that.
(FYI: Love the idea of block quotes being treated separately/differently-- I think this will encourage conversation)
Manton Reece @jsonbecker Exactly, it's as simple as the limit doubling when there's a block quote. You can try this on the web and see the counter change as you type. The "Embed" links are in the web timeline too to make copying a post easier, or you can use Markdown quotes.
Denny Henke Excellent! so happy to see this. I often like to just share links with quoted excerpts, hard to do with the previous limit. This is perfect.
Manton Reece 
Jatan I couldn’t be happier about this, especially the now obvious-seeming exception made for quotes! Thank you so much for listening to my, @Denny’s and other people’s feedback from a few months back! :D
Simon Woods Oh very nice! It's great to see this part of Micro.blog take on its own shape, with no obvious connotation regarding other platforms.
Rene van Belzen I assume this only applies to micro-posts without title?
Manton Reece @renevanbelzen Correct. No change for posts with a title.
💬 John Philpin nicely done sir … nicely done.
Brandon Trebitowski does the 600 character limit only apply when using Micro.Blogs’s blockquote (per the video you posted) or will it also work for posts that use markdown quoting (“>” character) ?
Paul Robert Lloyd Doubling the count for posts that include a blockquote is a really smart move – I really admire the diligent and thoughtful design choices you continue to make with Micro.blog, it’s refreshing!
Manton Reece Manton Reece @brandontreb It applies for Markdown quotes too. There is nothing really special about the "Embed" feature except that it fills everything in for a nice preview of the linked post. The counting is identical for Markdown or HTML.
Matt Huyck I hit reply and then noticed that @paulrobertlloyd said exactly what I was about to write. Thank you, as ever, for your thoughtful and deliberate design choices!
Manton Reece @fgtech @RianVDM Thanks y'all!
Pratik Nicely implemented. Love the extra leeway for quote blogs. This might make link-blogging easier.
Terence Thank you, , for this improvement.
I admire your willingness to not try to copy Twitter, where so many others make that mistake. It's really refreshing to see a developer promoting the possibility of more constructive exchanges on the web, as you do, through thoughtful design choices.
Numeric Citizen oh that is super cool. Tried it with a bookmark where I had a stored text highlight. Super handy. I like the tweaked user interface for posting too.
Manuel Riess neat! I always struggled to fit everything into a post when there's a quote 😊 One of those small things… 👍
Numeric Citizen @brandontreb I didn't know that we could copy & paste the "embed" from the web to the MB macOS client and have a window preview. Super handy.
Kevin Brice This is great! I’d love if this could also address all the blank characters Squarespace adds to its RSS feeds counting toward the character count. I’m still getting photos dropped from the feed with short captions.
Manton Reece @kbrice Unfortunately this won't fix that. I still want to solve that... I made one change but I don't think it was enough.
Brandon Trebitowski this is great! I often trim my quotes to make them fit inside of a 280 char post so that I can still add a bit of my own words. This will make for much more interesting posts. Thanks!
David G Smith I missed this when it rolled out, but it’s a really nice ‘little’ upgrade. Loving how Micro.blog is incrementally and humanely improving.