As a user of non-English languages, this is not really a problem in practice. We settled on UTF-8 years ago. My second language is pratically the worst case for bumping up against these limits and I never have an issue with them.
Really. So you don't think Japanese folks just don't run into problems? Or Koreans? Or anyone using a primarily upper Unicode alphabet that is phonetic?
Japanese and Chinese in particular can compress a lot more meaning in a byte than many other languages[1]. I pick up a random article at Nikkei.com[2] and calculate number of bytes of the first paragraph, and it's only 449 bytes in UTF-8[3]. Chinese is even more efficient at this, as you can basically fit the whole news in a Tweet.
[1]: Idiomatic Yojijukugo 四字熟語 is an extreme example for this, but there's non-idiom Yojijukugo too, e.g. 日米関係 is a 12 bytes word that translates to "United States-Japan relations"
[3]: It describes how people are walking around the park in Chicago on Jun 13 to catch a rare Pokemon with a one line interview of a son of Mr. Stuart from California.
(I speak three languages: Thai, English, Japanese)
This is completely anecdotal, but I have an alternative Twitter account where I interact with Japanese people I know, and I rarely hit the 140 characters limit except when I’m in a heated debate (or when I’m VERY excited about something).
For Thai, yeah, this one is a little more complicated. I’ve commented about this in sibling thread.
This makes it all the more baffling to me. You get 510 a line, but for a channel with a modest name in any other language, you get much less than that.
Let's just use a modest channel name like "#𐑥𐑨𐑔 𐑯 𐑕𐑲𐑧𐑯𐑕". I've now got a base 45 bytes without any message at all. If I want to aim a message at someone I have even less than that. Your pithy reply with a similarly modest title is 20% of the total allocation for a line, half of which is just overhead.
We run into line limits talk about category theory in #haskell even in English and folks are quite good at compressing contexts. The only alternative is to slice your messages across lines and make a confusing experience for participants.
I do operate a Korean IRC network and a message cut in the middle (often between UTF-8 boundaries, making clients guessing a wrong encoding from time to time) is a typical sightseeing.
