The launch of Meta’s free app comes as Twitter, which has been dramatically transformed by Musk since he purchased it last year, has introduced measures to limit nonpaying users’ experience on the platform.
Within hours of the Threads launch, Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez and Shakira were among the celebrities to join the platform. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who has criticized Twitter under Musk’s leadership, was among the first politicians to join. “May this platform have good vibes, strong community, excellent humor and less harassment,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.
In its first hours live, the app has appeared remarkably similar to Twitter. Users shared posts — or “threads” — with inspirational memes, late-night thoughts and sarcastic quips. One joked, “babe wake up another app to doomscroll on just dropped,” using a term popularized during the pandemic for the excessive consumption of negative posts on one’s phone.
Although Threads developers are eager to distinguish it from Twitter, the apps share many functional similarities. Like Twitter, Threads is focused on text posts, limiting each to 500 characters. Users can also tag one another using the @ symbol, as well as reply to and “repost” a thread. Unlike Twitter, however, the current version of Threads does not have a direct message function.
An early advantage for Threads is the app’s links to Instagram, giving it an easy-to-reach, built-in potential user base. Threads users can log in with one click using their Instagram credentials and are immediately given the option to carry over their existing username and follow some or all of the same accounts.
Would-be Twitter rivals, such as Mastodon and Bluesky, have yet to grow beyond single-digit millions of users.
In a Wednesday blog post, Meta said Threads was rolled out in more than 100 countries. But it is not available for download in the European Union, where Meta was recently fined $1.3 billion for breaching data privacy rules. The bloc’s new Digital Markets Act also calls into question some of the firm’s data-sharing practices.
Meanwhile, over at Twitter, Musk recently announced that the platform would temporarily limit the number of tweets that users could read per day and unveiled a “temporary emergency measure” preventing users who aren’t logged in from viewing tweets on the platform’s web browser. He said the moves were meant to prevent third-party programs from combing the platform for data.
