Threads appears to count every character in a URL as part of the 500 characters. A little surprising because I’m used to either Micro.blog (with inline links so no URL counts) or Twitter and Mastodon (with all URLs counting as a fixed size).

@manton They are doing something yucky here, because *in the Threads client*, if you let the link preview card load, you can then delete the URL, and it doesn’t count anymore

@manton I struggle with how to manage links, since so much of what I do is linkblogging. I want to use inline links on micro.blog, with some attribution, but then it looks ugly on Mastodon and Bluesky. I suspect whatever solution I choose will involve compromise.

@manton That’s probably to push people into “creating content” on Threads rather than linking to “external content”. Not surprising with how Meta thinks.

@ablaze @manton Both behaviors happen with the beta bsky client too.

Every URL character counts against bsky's limit (currently 300), but after manually adding the link card, you can delete the URL so it no longer counts against the limit. Net effect is clunky, but quick to implement.

Maybe just a beta thing, rather than a designed decision?