San Francisco, California - Twitter, the short-form text platform, is now an essay-length text platform, and the company has announced that tweets can now have a length of up to 10,000 characters, a massive increase from the previous 280-character limit.

This only applies to users paying the monthly $8 fee for the Twitter Blue subscription, which owner Elon Musk has been pushing as part of a shift away from the company's falling ad revenue.

"Twitter now supports Tweets up to 10,000 characters in length, with bold and italic text formatting," the company announced on Thursday, pointing users to subscribe for this feature. For a sense of how long 10,000 characters is: This news story has fewer than 2,000 characters.

The announcement comes days after Twitter's rivalry with Substack escalated when the newsletter platform announced plans to launch its own tweet-like functionality.

Twitter said it was now also allowing users to monetize their own content and that paying subscribers can also "apply to enable Subscriptions [...] to earn income directly on Twitter."

Substack, a space to sign up to newsletters mostly from individuals and smaller groups of writers, also lets content creators monetize their texts with subscriptions.

Twitter's shift to longer texts marks a significant break for the company, which has long stood out from other social media platforms with its strict limit on characters.

Initially, tweets could have up to 140 characters – the length of an SMS – until the limit was doubled to 280 characters a few years ago.

Co-founder Jack Dorsey, the boss at the time, was reluctant to change the nature of the platform short format any further.

Until now, the 280-character limit has meant that any user wanting to post longer texts often used a screengrab of a longer piece of text, which they then posted as a photo.