Application chat character limits?

Question

I'm building a MEAN web application which I hope to deploy on the open internet sometime soon. Part of this application includes a chat feature supported by the awesome Primus abstraction layer backed by WebSockets. As I was coding up the chat modules, the question came to mind of whether to impose character limits on these messages.

I concluded that it's probably good to have some limit, but I have no idea how to go about deciding what that limit should be. Should it depend on the beefiness of my server(s) at all? Should I just pick some reasonable limit? What exactly is considered a reasonable limit, and why?

How do web giants like Google and Facebook decide what the chat character limit should be for their applications? Does someone just say "hmmm this seems reasonable", and that's it?

Some additional Google searching turned up some things like this question about Jabber chat limits, A request to increase the chat character limit in the Blade and Soul MMO, and this comment about Twitch chat character limits, but I haven't seemed to be able to find anything that indicates what a typical chat character limit is for web-based applications, or why they are limited the way they are in the first place.

I know that in the past myself and others I know have hit seemingly unnecessarily short character limits on some chat applications. This can become a major annoyance, particularly when trying to copy and paste a significant amount of information. I want to avoid that annoyance for my users while still protecting the integrity of the server and bandwidth, keeping in mind that some users may be using the application with network usage limits and such.

EDIT

The application I'm working on is a game, but a game that would at times involve some significant diplomacy and strategic discussions among players. Having a specific suggestion for that use case would be helpful, but it would obviously be much more helpful to have some underlying principles to guide chat limits on all kinds of applications.

Answer 1

This really depends on the use case of the Chat. I mean if your Users should keep their messages short (Like Twitter or something) then you should make it quite short like 150, 250 or something like that.

If your users shall discuss stuff, then you'll need a way more characters like 5000 up wards.