It is officially official for Threads, Meta’s text-based app that will compete with Twitter. The new service was announced by Mark Zuckerberg one day before its scheduled launch on July 6th, which first surfaced in app stores earlier this week. Although Meta has started to roll out the new service globally, it won’t be accessible in the European Union until the company has addressed any potential regulatory issues.
A blog post announcing the Twitter rival defined Threads as a “separate space for real-time updates and public conversations” that relies on users’ Instagram credentials but would soon be compatible with a wider range of decentralized platforms like Mastodon. However, at the moment, users of Threads log in using their current Instagram accounts for both the app and the website. Existing usernames and verification status will “carry over” to Threads, although users can still further modify their profiles.
The company will mainly rely on recommendations, similar to Instagram, to help users find new accounts to follow. To avoid giving new users an empty social network, Meta has been covertly testing the service with a select number of celebrities and creators as well as its own staff.
Users of Instagram will recognize the service’s interface even though it strongly resembles Twitter. In addition to photos and videos lasting up to five minutes, it allows for text posts of up to 500 characters. Besides being able to quote posts, Threads will feature reposts, which are like retweets on Twitter. Furthermore, users can set a reply limit, unfollow, and report other users. Moreover, users can effortlessly share posts from Threads to their Instagram Stories to increase their visibility.
Elon Musk established tough rate limits two days before the debut, substantially limiting the number of posts that many users could access on the platform. This chaotic period for Twitter overlaps with the launch. Also, the company stopped displaying tweets to logged-out users before silently changing its mind. Both unfavorable decisions were attributed to “data scraping,” according to Musk, who has warned about AI companies training their platforms on Twitter data.
Meta is taking on Twitter with Threads as well as the booming field of Twitter alternatives like Mastodon. It intends to make Threads compatible with ActivityPub, the open source protocol that runs Mastodon and other decentralized services commonly referred to as the “Fediverse,” as well as other decentralized services.
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