Social Media Character Counter

To the fold, for anything that lives in a feed. The limit is a hard ceiling the platform enforces; the fold is where readers stop seeing your words without tapping "…more" — and most never tap. A 2,000-character Instagram caption is legal, but only the first ~125 characters are doing feed work. Put the hook and the payoff before the fold, and treat everything after it as bonus material for readers you've already won.

Yes — it's every platform's counter at once. Paste your text and it shows the live count against X's 280-character post limit, Instagram's 2,200-character caption limit, plus TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, YouTube, and more, side by side. So it works as a Twitter/X character counter, an Instagram caption length checker, and a TikTok character counter in a single view, with each platform's fold point flagged as well as its hard limit.

Hashtags and mentions count as ordinary text on every major platform — #springdrop is ten characters everywhere. Links vary: X and Mastodon flatten every URL to a flat 23 characters regardless of its real length, while Instagram, LinkedIn, and Threads count the full URL. That flat 23 is why a tweet with a monster link can fit when your notes app says it can't.

Not a universal one, and most "ideal length" statistics are confounded — short posts get more engagement partly because punchy ideas get written short. What holds up in practice: the first sentence carries the post on every platform, feed-folded platforms reward front-loading, and length should follow the idea. Write the idea, front-load it, and let this table tell you where it stands — not the other way around.

Because platforms genuinely count differently. X weighs characters (most Latin script is 1, emoji and CJK are 2) and flattens URLs to 23; Mastodon borrows the URL rule; Bluesky counts graphemes, so a four-code-point family emoji is one character. The columns apply each platform's own arithmetic — the same engine our thread splitter uses — which is why they're trustworthy and why they disagree with each other.

Most platforms simply block the publish button until you're under — X greys out Post, Instagram refuses the share. The sneakier failure is pasting: some apps and schedulers silently clip pasted text at the limit, and the missing tail is easy not to notice until a follower asks why your caption ends mid-sentence. After pasting a long caption anywhere, check the last line survived.

Yes — every line break is one character, and a blank line between paragraphs is two. They're usually worth the spend, since whitespace is what makes long captions readable. The platform-specific wrinkle is Instagram, which has a habit of stripping line breaks on publish under certain conditions — a formatting quirk, not a counting one.