On 6th July, soon after launching Threads, a rival of Twitter, Meta’s chief Mark Zuckerberg broke his Twitter silence and taunted Twitter chief Elon Musk with a Spiderman meme. Zukerberg’s tweet was his first in 11 years. His last tweet was an appeal to his followers to tell the Congressmen to be pro-internet. By the time this report was published, Musk had not replied to the meme. Reportedly, Threads has already achieved the milestone of 10 million users.
— Mark Zuckerberg (@finkd) July 6, 2023
Interestingly, before Zuckerberg published the “Spiderman clone” meme mocking Musk as Threads is basically a copy of Twitter. Musk had replied with a laughing emoji to a tweet by Twitter user cb_doge who had mocked Meta for “copy-pasting” Twitter.
😂
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023
Replying to a post by MMA fighter Mike Davis who questioned if anyone thinks Threads could become bigger than Twitter, Zuckerburg said, “It will take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully, we will.”
In another reply to a post by TV personality Mark Cuban who questioned if Zuckerburg really wanted to open Threads for all as it apparently looked a “pretty nice” place with lesser users, Zuckerburg said, “The goal is to keep it friendly as it expands. I think it’s possible and will ultimately be the key to its success. That’s one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently.”
Reports suggest that Threads has already been downloaded over 10 million times making it looks comparatively easy for Zuckerburg to achieve the target of one billion+ users. Not to forget, Instagram already has 2.35 billion active users.
Threads by Meta launched
On 5th July (local time), Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, officially launched the Instagram-linked app Threads which is a Twitter rival. It is widely seen as the most significant competition to Elon Musk-owned social media platform that has seen an array of changes since the billionaire took over in 2022.
In an official announcement on Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg said, “Alright guys! big news today. We are launching threads, an open and friendly public space for conversations. It takes the best parts of the Instagram experience and creates a whole new app around text, ideas and sharing what’s on your mind. You just signup with your Instagram account. Your followers are already there. And you just get into it and get started. It is available on the App Store now. The people who have tried it so far, the reactions have been really great.”
Threads are linked to the Instagram of the users. It provides a real-time platform just like Twitter and allows users to post text-based posts up to 500 characters. As per the official announcement by Meta, everyone who is under 16 or 18 as per the location, will be defaulted into a private profile when they join Threads. Apart from the people users follow on Instagram, they can find more people to follow and communicate with on Threads.
Meta has provided the option to control who can mention the users or reply to the Threads. There is an option to make the experience clean by filtering out words that users do not want to see in replies. Just like Instagram, users can unfollow, block, restrict, or report a profile, if needed. If a user has blocked an account on Instagram, it will be automatically blocked on Threads.
When you log in to your Threads account using the Instagram account, it will show the list of people you follow on Instagram. You can follow them immediately and whenever they join Threads, you will automatically start following them.
