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.
Furthermore, apart from 500 characters, users can also add photos and videos for up to 5 minutes in the posts. There is an option to add Threads posts to Instagram stories and other social media platforms as well making it more interactive.
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.
Meta further added that they are planning to make the platform compatible with ActivitiPub, the open social networking protocol that Mastodon and WordPress use. They said, “This would make Threads interoperable with other apps that also support the ActivityPub protocol, such as Mastodon and WordPress – allowing new types of connections that are simply not possible on most social apps today. Other platforms including Tumblr have shared plans to support the ActivityPub protocol in the future.”
Speaking to the Verge head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said that the “volatility and unpredictability” of Twitter has allowed Meta to compete with the platform. He also pointed out that Twitter has seen several outages and limits to the number of tweets people can view in a single day that was imposed recently. However, the restrictions are slowly being lifted as they were only a temporary measure to put a break of massive data scrapping that was being done by large companies including AI developers.
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. For example, 1,000 followers of Prime Minister Narendra Modi join Threads and started following him but he does not have an official account yet. Whenever he joins, these 1,000 followers will automatically start following him.
The launch date of Threads was announced on 4th July. As of now, Threads is available in 100 countries and users can download it from App Store or Play Store depending on the operating system. The app is not available in European Union as of now owing to regulatory concerns.
