How many friends can you have on Snapchat? Snapchat isn’t just a platform for sharing snaps—it’s a vibrant community with its own rules, including a limit on how many friends you can connect with.
For you to navigate Snapchat effectively while making meaningful interactions that will be beneficial in future, you need to know how many best friends you can have.
In this piece, we will go over the amount of friends and best friends you can have on Snapchat. We’ll also talk about the dangers of having too many friends on the platform.
How many friends can you have on Snapchat?
While Snapchat may have a cap on the amount of friends it allows you to have, you can have up to a maximum of 5,000 friends.
This is to prevent the app from getting lags or becoming unfriendly for users.
As soon as you’ve reached the cap, you won’t be able to add any more friends unless you remove some friends from that list.
However, this feature is separate from your total friend limit on Snapchat going into your best friends section.
You can have thousands of friends in the app, but you’re only allowed 8 best friends on the feature based on people you speak to regularly.
Thanks to this, the feature is dynamic and lets you keep track of the people you interact with the most.
Why does Snapchat have a friend limit?
Snapchat has a friend limit for obvious reasons, but the reasons are not limited only to that.
The app already has millions of active users, and managing these user connections its reasonable for Snapchat to place limits for security reasons and convenience. The 5,000 friend limit might seem restrictive to some but it’s essential to the quality of interactions and making it an abuse free zone.
Preventing spam and fake accounts
One of the biggest reasons Snapchat places a limit on who you can interact with is to prevent spam and reduce the spread of fake accounts. Without the restrictions it will be easier for spammers, and malicious bots to bombard users with unsolicited messages, push ads or cause harm.
With a capped number of friends, Snapchat can more effectively monitor user behavior and quickly identify suspicious activities.
Snapchat can protect users from junk messages, getting scammed, and allowing spammers from growing their connections so quickly.
Ensuring a high-quality user experience
The aim for Snapchat is to ensure that most of its users have a great time. To maintain the quality, the app must limit users. With a lot of interactions, your app could slow down with noticeably slow load times, slow sending of snaps, or even crash.
With the 5,000 friend limit, Snapchat can manage how much data is flowing through its platform, and still make sure the speed and stability of the platform is maintained.
If someone has a lot of friends to scroll through, even with a small number of active chats they may still see slow performance.
Encouraging meaningful connections
Another reason why Snapchat has a friend limit is because it believes in encouraging legitimate and genuine connections.
Snapchat has a low barrier for adding friends, which leads to a more involved user experience — connections are through real relationships and there’s a lot of engagement.
Instead of allowing users to accumulate thousands of friends mindlessly, the app’s features around best friends ensures users have meaningful interactions.
By putting a cap on the friends limit, Snap removes any sort of incentive to fill your feed with people you’ve never met.
Improving server performance and scalability
The reason behind the friend limit is due to technical implications in Snapchat’s server.
Managing an app with millions of users means you have to be able to process big amounts of data quickly and efficiently.
If you’re allowed to connect with as many people as you want, the server’s loading will reduce.
This will lead to servers performing poorly, crash, and basically provide a bad user experience.
Limiting friends also makes Snapchat run more smoothly, because the app is better optimized which ensures fast processing, and prevents server overload.
Scaling the platform without sacrificing the ability to keep it responsive, and be capable of handling millions of interactions at once would not be possible without the friend limitation.
How to check how many friends you have on Snapchat?
To avoid any unexpected surprises on your friends limit, you need to know how many friends you currently have.
1. Open Snapchat and log in to your account.
2. Click on the profile icon and move down to “Friends.”
3. Tap on “My Friends.”
4. Now you can do the tally of the number of friends you have.
What to do when Snapchat says you have too many friends?
If Snapchat informs you that you have too many friends or you’re almost hitting the 5,000 friend limit, you have to clear space for new friends.
Review and remove duplicate or fake accounts
Sometimes users add duplicate accounts on Snapchat or spammy profiles that aren’t even real connections.
Fake or duplicate accounts take up valuable space on your list while delivering little to no interaction.
Browse through your friending list and pick out any friends you have suspicions of Snapchat activity or inactive nature.
Unfollow or delete people you don’t need to be friends with
According to Snapchat, you have the option to follow other accounts without necessarily making them friends.
For those that are close to the friend limit and want to follow people without immediate interaction, you can unfollow certain accounts.
So let’s say you follow influencers, celebrities, brands that post interesting stuff but you don’t have to add them to your friend list for their snaps or stories to appear in your feed.
Unfollowing these accounts will free up space for new friends without you reaching the 5,000 friend limit.
Create custom friend groups
Rather than continue to fill your network with individual friends, think about creating Snap Groups from the friends you already have.
You can have multiple people on one screen at once via group chats on Snapchat.
It’s a great way to be able to spend more time with greater circle of friends, rather than raising your friend count.
You can then build a group around a shared interest, or activity and you can still engage with members without hitting the limit.
Wait for Snapchat to remove inactive accounts
From time to time, Snapchat removes accounts that haven’t done anything in a long time.
If you’ve made it past your friend limit and aren’t able to manually remove many users. Snapchat will do the job for you after sometime.
If an account has been suspended, or dormant for a long time. They will automatically be reomoved from the friend list.
However, this is an unpredictable process, so do everything else to control your list more often.
The risks of too many Snapchat friends for kids
Too many friends accumulating on a child’s Snapchat can create several potential risks that could impact your child’s safety, wellbeing and user experience.
1. Exposure to inappropriate content
The more friends a child has on Snapchat, the larger the chance that this will introduce them to harmful or inappropriate content.
It can be an explicit message, graphic image or peer pressure which pushes them to engage in riskys activities.
This means that as kids have more connections. They’re more likely to come into contact with users who share posts they shouldn’t be seeing.
2. Difficulty maintaining privacy
If a child has many friends, it is harder for them to manage who sees their private snaps and stories.
With such a network of people, there’s a good chance that some mightl post something they shouldn’t and share it out to strangers, or people they don’t necessarily really trust.
In doing so, this will expose theit personal and sensitive information from which can easily lead to exploitaitons from strangers.
3. Cyberbullying and harassment
More friends means a greater chance a child will be exposed to Snapchat bullying or harassment.
Children become more vulnerable to be targeted by those who perfome cyberbullying, send mean or threatening messages or create a hostile environment for kids.
4. Unhealthy social pressure
When kids have a large friend group they might get pressure to project an image of wanting to be like othes when it doesn’t fit their values.
This may cause them to post things they wouldn’t like photos, videos, and messages designed to please their peers, rather than themselves.
That social pressure can negatively affect their mental health and self esteem because they might feel pressured to do things to fit in and not be themselves.
5. Difficulty identifying fake accounts
Too many friends on Snapchat makes it increasingly challenging for children to tell who they actually know, versus accounts or strangers with negative intentions.
Because children are more likely to accept friend requests from people they don’t know well. They’re at risk of interacting with people who might prey, scam or manipulate them.
How to helps parents monitor kid’s Snapchat friend limits
If you’re a parent who wants to keep your kids safe on Snapchat. The tools like FlashGet Kids are key to help you monitor and manage your kid’s social media activities.
Several features of FlashGet Kids are geared towards helping parents monitor their child’s Snapchat friends, and use it for a limited amount of time.
Monitoring friend lists
FlashGet Kids has useful features to help you monitor your kids. Screen mirroring allows you to see your kid’s screen in real-time. You can see your child’s best friend list in real-time from your phone. Snapshotting takes screenshots of your child’s screen at regular intervals. This can help you spot the disappearing messages your child may be seeing on their phone.
Setting limits on social apps
FlashGet Kids has an app time limit feature that lets you control how much time your kid can use a specific app. This feature is useful when your kid spends too much time on social media apps like Snapchat. By limiting the time they spend on the platform, you reduce the potential for exposure to inappropriate content and cyberbullying.
Tracking friend count and receiving alerts
Even though Snapchat’s transient messages may be difficult to track. FlashGet Kids may help you notice any time your kid makes new friends. Through the notifications feature, you’ll receive alerts on everything going on on your child’s phone. And this includes notifications from the Snapchat app.
Conclusion
While Snapchat allows friends to numbers as high as 5,000 on the app. It puts a limit on how many of these friends to keep as best friends.
Your interactions, chats and snaps, determine the 8 best friends that Snapchat allows you to have.
However, if you’re concerned about how many friends your kids can have on Snapchat. You can use FlashGet Kids to monitor them.
With FlashGet Kids, parents can set screen time limits on Snapchat, monitor kids interactions, and receive daily reports on their Snapchat usage.
