The new app is from Meta’s Instagram. Instead of based around photos like Instagram, Threads is made for text updates.
To begin, you will login with your Instagram account info. Your Instagram username will carry over to Threads. You can also customize your profile specifically for Threads. There are two account choices, public or private.
One substantial note, though. If you ever want to delete your Threads account, you will also have to delete your Instagram account as well.
Posts on the service can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes in length.
You can share a Threads post to an Instagram story or share the post to any other platform.
Here’s how Meta describes the app:
Instagram is where billions of people around the world connect over photos and videos. Our vision with Threads is to take what Instagram does best and expand that to text, creating a positive and creative space to express your ideas. Just like on Instagram, with Threads you can follow and connect with friends and creators who share your interests – including the people you follow on Instagram and beyond. And you can use our existing suite of safety and user controls.
Users can control who can mention you or rely to you within Threads. You can also add hidden words to filter out replies to your Threads that contain those words. Any account previously blocked on Instagram will also be blocked on Threads.
In the future, the Threads app will be compatible with ActivityPub, an open social networking protocol. When complete, that will allow you to stop using Threads and transfer your content over to a new compatible service like Mastodon or WordPress.
After it’s official introduction late Wednesday night, more than 30 million users have signed up.
With Twitter’s continued issues, most recently a limit on how many tweets you can view per day, continue to pile up, the real question will be if Threads can gain enough traction in an already crowded market of competitors.
Threads is a free download on the App Store. It’s just for the iPhone.
