Thanks to Elon Musk’s antics, Twitter has been on aself-destruction path for the last few months. This has led to the rise of other decentralized platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky Social, but they have not really taken off. Now, it is Mark Zuckerberg’s turn to take a shot at building a potential Twitter alternative. Asannounced earlier this week, Threads made by the Instagram team has gone live, letting you post real-time updates and have public conversations that anyone can join.
The problem with all other Twitter alternatives so far was the lack of users. In comparison, Meta is relying on Instagram’s user base to build Threads. This seems to have worked, asZuckerberg revealed in a Thread postthat the platform has received over five million sign-ups within four hours and 10 million sign-ups in seven hours.
Instagram notes in itsannouncementthat Thread profiles for people under the age of 16 (or 18 in some countries) will be defaulted to private.
Unlike Twitter, Threads does not offer a chronological or a ‘Following’ timeline. Instead, your feed will consist of posts from people you follow and content recommended by the platform. Each post on Thread can have up to 500 characters, and you can share photos, links, and videos up to 5 minutes long. You can easily share Threads as a Story or post on Instagram, with the app prominently highlighting a Tweet option in the share menu as well.
To coincide with Threads' launch, Mark Zuckerberg revived his inactive Twitter account to post a cheeky tweet.
More importantly, Instagram is working on adding ActivityPub support to Threads. This is the same decentralized social networking protocol upon which Mastodon is based. It will allow you to move your Threads to another decentralized service whenever you wish. Meta wants users of other decentralized networks to interact with people on Threads and vice versa, even if they don’t have a Threads account.
Besides this, Instagram is working on adding new features to Threads, like improved feed recommendations and a search function to follow real-time topics easily.
Threads is currently available in over 100 countries. However, the app is not available in the EU due to regulatory concerns (viaBloomberg). The Digital Markets Act prevents Meta from sharing user data between platforms.
