The CEO of Threads, a rival to Twitter’s Meta, said that in the first four hours of existence, 5 million people signed up for the service.
The company is trying to lure users away from Elon Musk’s troubled platform with longer posts, a few celebrity backers, and a strong resemblance to Meta.
The owner of Facebook and Instagram accelerated the launch of the app by 15 hours to 7 p.m. EDT in the US and midnight in the UK, making it freely accessible in 100 nations on the Apple and Google app stores, albeit it won’t be available in the EU due to regulatory concerns. Within minutes of launching, brands including Billboard, HBO, NPR, and Netflix had accounts set up.
According to Meta, Shakira and Gordon Ramsay were two of the first celebrities to support the project. A more recent rumor claims that Oprah Winfrey and the Dalai Lama were also contacted. Instagram accounts are required to log into Threads. If they have also downloaded the new app, they can choose to follow the same profiles they do on Instagram once they have signed up.
Although some of the text has been modified, the program physically resembles Twitter quite a bit, with retweets referred to as “reposts” and tweets as “threads.” In the past, Meta hasn’t been afraid to steal ideas from other products, as seen with the launch of Instagram’s Reels feature in 2020, which has drawn comparisons to TikTok’s short-form videos.
Unlike ordinary Twitter users, who are limited to 280 characters in their posts, Threads users can make 500-character posts and up to five-minute videos, and they can share their posts as links on other networks. People can be reported, blocked, unfollowed, or restricted by users. Additionally, users can filter out comments that contain particular words.
Meta has introduced Threads in response to yet another trying time at Twitter, which, over the weekend, imposed tweet viewing limits in a move it partially attributed to data harvesting by businesses developing artificial intelligence models. The challenges were addressed by Zuckerberg in later Threads posts. “I believe there needs to be an app for public chats with at least 1 billion users. Despite having the chance, Twitter hasn’t succeeded in doing this. Hopefully, we’ll succeed,” he wrote.
Many praised the app’s simplicity of use, while others suggested Elon Musk should be concerned. Reactions to the app’s release on Wednesday ranged from caution to joy. Others noted that the swift Instagram integration of the app demonstrated the growing power of Meta. Ironically, a significant portion of the discourse took place on Twitter, where “Threads” was a popular hashtag on Wednesday night.
The Facebook founder and Musk reportedly agreed to a cage battle over the issue after learning about Zuckerberg’s upcoming Threads presentation, but a date for the unusual confrontation has not been scheduled. As a “new, independent platform for real-time updates and public conversations,” Threads, according to Meta, aims to “take what Instagram does best and expand that to text, offering a positive and creative space to share your ideas.”
More than 250 million people use Twitter, whereas 2 billion people are said to use Instagram. According to Meta, the app would mirror Twitter’s competitors like Mastodon, which is based on a decentralized platform and would permit the movement of accounts to other platforms.
It stated, “We are striving to make Threads compatible with the free, open-source social networks that we think can influence the direction of the internet.” By integrating ActivityPub, the technology that also powers Mastodon and enables social networks to communicate with one another, into Threads, Meta claimed that it would enable users of Threads to transfer their followers and accounts to other ActivityPub-supported apps.
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