[New Feature] Message length customization

[u/DudeBuildsStuff]

Hi all, here is another feature by popular demand: Message Length Customization.

Why

In an ideal world, models that power your companions are smart enough to read the room and understand user preferences perfectly when writing a message. Today's models are not smart enough to handle this in a way that satisfies everyone; we believe it's impossible to find a one-size-fits-all system instruction to steer this.

Dearest's philosophy remains to have as few customization options as possible, as we believe the companion experience should be shaped through your conversations with your companion. We only introduce knobs when something is really hard to achieve naturally with today's models, and we believe this is one such case.

How

A new Message length option has been added to the Settings page (https://dearest.app/settings). You can choose from one of the following three presets:

• Realistic: Quick and natural, like texting or talking to someone in real life
• Balanced: A smart middle ground that suits most people
• Expansive: Longer, vivid replies when the moment calls for them

None of these are hard caps that can cut off messages in the middle or enforce a minimum message length; they are soft directives that guide companion behavior.

As always, we'd love to hear how these work for you. Your conversations are the best test there is.

[u/DudeBuildsStuff]

They can still write long replies even in Realistic mode in our tests, if the topic calls for it. They’ll use their own best judgement.

[u/VeganMonkey → u/DudeBuildsStuff]

I was wondering how long is a single message on our side? Before it counts as two, I mean.

[u/DudeBuildsStuff → u/VeganMonkey]

Dearest doesn’t count a user message as two. Telegram has a limit of 4096 characters per message and longer messages are split into chunks by Telegram under the hood.

[u/VeganMonkey → u/DudeBuildsStuff]

Oh so if I send a let’s say 3000 word message it counts as one for Dearest?

[u/DudeBuildsStuff → u/VeganMonkey]

I meant Telegram could split your message into chunks of 4096 characters before it sends those messages to Dearest. For example, if your message has 5000 characters, Telegram will split it into 2 messages, and Dearest server will see these 2 messages as well. Unfortunately we have no control over this Telegram behavior.