X Increases Group Chat Limit to 256 Members

The platform formerly known as Twitter has increased its group chat limit once again, with users now able to engage in private DM groups of up to 256 people.

As per this post from X Engineer Enrique Barragan, the new limit will now enable an additional 56 people to join your maxed out DM groups.

X has been working to increase its chat options, as it looks to lean into emerging engagement trends.

X expanded its group chat member limit to 100 people last June, then again to 200 in August. It’s now boosted it once again, in order to provide comparative chat options to other apps.

For context:

WhatsApp allows up to 1024 members in a chat group
Messenger facilitates group chats of up to 250 people
Snapchat groups are capped at 101 members

Though a key focus, based on X’s announcement, is Discord, which facilitates much broader group discussions within its servers. Technically, Discord servers can host up to 25k people at once, though the actual group chat limits vary dependent on several factors. But conceptually, X could be moving towards enabling broader group discussions like this, which, again, given the way that social engagement is headed, could be a valuable update.

Over the last few years, more and more of the “social” elements of social media apps (i.e. human-to-human engagement) have been moving out of public view, with fewer people posting to their social feed, and opting to share updates with enclosed groups of friends instead.

There’s a range of reasons for this, including negative backlash over old social media posts, increasing division and angst in post discussion, and burnout from feeling like everything has to be a public spectacle, like everything that you do has to also be “content” for your feeds.

Those pressures have led to more people just not posting, while the platforms themselves are increasingly leaning into entertainment-based approaches, as opposed to engagement and interaction-focused elements.

As such, all platforms now need to provide more DM options, and through improved DMs, including audio and video calls, as well as enclosed topic Communities, X is also looking to align with that shift.