Usernames no longer count toward Twitter’s 140-character limit

Twitter is making good on a product promise the company announced almost a year ago but never rolled out: Longer tweet replies.

Beginning Thursday, when you reply to another user’s tweet, that person’s username won’t count toward the 140-characters allotted for your response. That means you’ll have more room to share whatever it is you have to say.

The move is part of a broader effort at Twitter to go “beyond 140” characters and give people more room to tweet without dramatically altering the company’s signature 140-character limit. For a while in late 2015 and early 2016, the company considered expanding the character limit to 10,000 characters. But that plan fell through.

Twitter first announced this update last May but is just now rolling it out; Twitter said at the time it wanted to give partners who use its API a chance to prepare for longer tweets.

But that was 10 months ago, and Twitter pushed out other updates that gave users more room as early as September. So who knows.

The update is here now, though, so enjoy the extra room to tell people exactly how you really feel.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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