I have been trying to create a post in the Canada community. Scuttlebutt is that the post limit was set to 10,000 characters, but has since been set to 50,000 characters. My post has 9961 UTF-8 characters (9969 characters overall, 8396 characters excluding spaces) and when I hit submit the submission never completes.
i did another test post (https://lemmy.ca/post/795726) with some emoji, and it appears that it’s counting each one as two “characters”. so yes, it looks like it’s just counting bytes.