Threads, Meta’s text-based Twitter challenge app, is now official. Mark Zuckerberg announced the new service a day ahead of its July 6 launch date, which hit app stores earlier this week. Meta has begun rolling out the new service globally, but will not be available in the European Union until the company has addressed potential regulatory concerns.
In a blog post announcing the Twitter rival, the company described Threads as a “separate space for real-time updates and public conversations” based on users’ Instagram credentials, but ultimately with a wider range of decentralized services like Mastodon will be compatible. For now, however, Threads users will log into the app and website using their existing Instagram account. The company will “carry over” existing usernames and verification statuses to threads, although users will have the ability to further customize their profiles.
As with Instagram, the company will rely heavily on recommendations to help people discover new accounts to follow. And Meta was test calmly The service is made up of a small group of celebrities and creatives, as well as its own staff, so new users aren’t greeted with a blank social network.
The service itself looks remarkably similar to Twitter, although its design will look familiar to Instagram users. It supports text posts of up to 500 characters and photos and videos of up to five minutes. Threads also support reposts—the version of a retweet—as well as quote posts. Users can also limit their replies, as well as block and report other users. And posts from threads can be easily shared to users’ Instagram story for additional visibility.
Meta
The launch comes at a particularly chaotic time for Twitter, just days after Elon Musk announced strict rate caps that severely limited the number of posts many users could see on the platform. The company also stopped showing tweets to logged-out users before quietly backing down. Musk, who has complained about AI companies training their platforms on Twitter data, blamed both unpopular moves on “data scraping.”
With Threads, Meta not only challenges Twitter, but also the growing wave of Twitter alternatives like Mastodon. The company plans to make Threads compatible with ActivityPub, the open-source protocol that powers Mastodon and other decentralized services, sometimes collectively referred to as “Fediverse.”
“Our plan is to partner with ActivityPub to offer you the ability to stop using threads and port your content to another service,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Our vision is that people using compatible apps can follow and interact with people in Threads without having a Threads account and vice versa, ushering in a new era of diverse and connected networks.”
As Meta explains, this means that users of Mastodon and other services that support ActivityPub can follow and interact with publicly facing posts in threads. (Private accounts in Threads can still manually approve new followers from other services.) And other developers might one day create their own Threads-compatible features and services.
It is currently not clear how long it will take before Meta ActivityPub fully integrates with threads. In an early post on the service, seen just before the official launch, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said the company is “committed” to the protocol, but didn’t give a timeline. It’s also not clear how the ActivityPub integration might affect content moderation and other security issues. While Meta’s Threads app follows the same content moderation policies as Instagram, services created by other developers may set their own standards and policies, just as different instances on Mastodon have their own policies and norms. Meta points out that this gives users “the freedom to choose rooms that match their values.”
However, the biggest question Threads currently faces is whether it has any chance of becoming a viable Twitter alternative. Since Musk acquired the company last year, Twitter users have flocked to alternative platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, T2, and others. But so far none have come anywhere near the scale of Twitter, let alone Meta. But with Instagram users surpassing 1 billion, Zuckerberg and Meta are clearly hoping they can gain traction much faster than other decentralized upstarts.
“It will take time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with more than a billion people,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Threads shortly after launch. “Twitter had the opportunity but didn’t make it. Hopefully we can do that.”
Update on Jul 5, 2023 5:15pm PT: This story has been updated to quote a post from Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads account.