The social networking platform that was once Twitter has raised its limit of people in group chats yet again, and users can stay connected with private groups of up to 256 people through direct messaging.
As per the post from X Engineer Enrique Barragan, an additional 56 people will be allowed into your maxed-out DM groups going forward.

X has been working to increase its chat options as it seems the company is leaning into emerging engagement trends.

X had increased the limit of members that can join a group chat from 100 people, which was set last June, to 200 in August. Now, it's increasing again to give comparative chat options with other apps.

For context:

WhatsApp allows up to 1024 members in a chat group
Messenger facilitates group chats of up to 250 people
Groups in Snapchat can host a maximum of 101 members.
Although this is clearly a focus, according to X's announcement, Discord, which enables much more extensive group discussions within its servers, is enabled. Technically, Discord servers can indeed support up to 25k people at one time, though the actual limits of group chats vary depending on several factors. But conceptually, X might be moving to enable much more comprehensive group discussions like this, which, considering how social engagement is headed, might be a very useful update.

In recent years, increasingly "social" aspects of social media applications-those involving human-to-human connection-have moved out of public view, with fewer people posting to their social feed and instead sharing updates with closed circles of friends.

There are many reasons this is happening now, such as 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.

That has led to more folks just not posting, and the platforms themselves are increasingly shifting towards entertainment-based approaches, rather than engagement and interaction-focused elements.

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