About Threads
Meta, Instagram’s parent company launched Threads, which will be a text-based conversation app, rivaling Twitter.
Threads, released on Wednesday evening, a day before its scheduled release, allows users to join up directly from their Instagram accounts; it is a platform that allows users to publish short posts or updates that are up to 500 characters. They can include links, photos, or videos up to 5 minutes long.
More than 2 billion monthly active users will be able to import their accounts into Threads once it is made available to everyone.
Threads now have 70 million signups, according to a Friday morning post by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and that number is certain to rise over the next few days. (In comparison, Instagram has 1.3 billion users that log on every day. Twitter has 259 million daily active users at the end of 2022. 13 million accounts in total are on Mastodon.)
A Threat to Twitter
Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram, claimed that under Musk, Twitter's "volatility" and "unpredictability" gave Instagram the chance to compete. According to Mosseri in an interview, Threads is made for "public conversations," which is an obvious reference to how Twitter executives have described the service's function throughout the years.
In regards to its threads’ competitor space, Mosseri says “Obviously, Twitter pioneered the space[…]And there are a lot of good offerings out there for public conversations. But just given everything that was going on, we thought there was an opportunity to build something that was open and something that was good for the community that was already using Instagram.”
For some time now, Meta has been getting ready to introduce Threads, which it calls a "sanely run" substitute for Twitter. The response to Musk's recent limitation on how many tweets people may watch per day, according to internal business documents I've seen, served as the impetus for this week's app release. Furthermore, they assert that Meta expects "tens of millions" of users to use Threads within the first few months of its release.
As described by Mosseri, Thread is a “risky endeavor,” especially considering that it's a brand-new program that users must download. After receiving access to Threads earlier, users were able to rapidly fill out account information and follow lists by having Meta automatically pull information from my Instagram account.
In many important aspects, Threads is surprisingly similar to Twitter. Posts (or, as Mosseri refers to them, "threads") from accounts you follow are displayed in the app's main feed along with accounts that Instagram's algorithm has recommended. Reposting something allows you to add users’ opinions, and main feed answers are clearly shown. Though it might be added later, there is no feed that solely contains the people you follow.
Since Twitter has been around for a while and has amassed a distinctive network, it presents another element that Threads must deal with. It is evident from Meta's behavior that, despite Musk's theatrics over the previous few months, unseating Twitter would not be easy. It would be a mistake, in Mosseri's opinion, to "undervalue Twitter and Elon." The community on Twitter is tremendously powerful and vibrant, and it has a long history. The network effects are very powerful.