Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, has made a history of copying features from other platforms. This time, Meta has launched Threads, a social media app connected to Instagram that works more like Twitter and should eventually connect to Mastodon.
Meta, as the maker of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has been after Twitter for many, many years. The company attempted to buy Twitter back in 2008, but that didn’t work out. Last year, Elon Musk acquired Twitter, and then promptly ran it into the ground. That has led to a surge in popularity for Twitter-like platforms, and now Meta’s take is live.
Threads is a micro-blogging platform that looks and feels just like Twitter, letting you post texts up to 500 characters. This is almost twice Twitter’s 280-character standard limit, but still just enough for posts to not feel like a wall of text. The platform itself is heavily linked to Instagram, and if you have an Instagram account, you can sign up for Threads with a couple of taps. All handles are pre-reserved — your username on Instagram will be your username on Threads.
It was intended to launch today, but Meta made a surprise early launch in the afternoon yesterday. And so far, it’s actually seeing plenty of adoption, with the platform getting up to 20 million users within the first hours of launch. However, many of those accounts are brands instead of actual people. Instagram’s user base is in the billions, so we can only expect this number to keep going up as time goes by. However, it’s currently restricted from the European Union due to its privacy problems — this is the same company that gave us Facebook, so that checks out.
As it keeps growing, we can also expect a number of other changes, too. Threads is supposed to play nice with Mastodon and the Fediverse, and it will be getting ActivityPub support down the road. The exact degree to which Mastodon and Threads will be interoperable remains to be seen, but you’ll be able to follow and interact with Mastodon users from Threads. Likewise, Mastodon users will be able to follow Threads users by using their full username, such as “@[email protected].”
If you want to give it a spin, Threads is now available from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
Source: Meta, 9to5Google
