Threads, Meta’s latest social media offering, designed to take on Twitter, has gone live with at least 10 million users signing up in its first seven hours, founder Mark Zuckerberg said.
The app went live shortly after midnight Thursday in Nigeria amid high expectations from social media users increasingly frustrated by erratic policies at Twitter since Elon Musk bought the platform last year.
Unlike Instagram, also owned by Meta, Threads is mostly text-based. It allows users to confirm their new accounts using their existing Instagram credentials. Non-Instagram users can also customise Threads profiles independently.
Users can post short text updates of up to 500 characters, links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes in length.
Threads is available on iOS and Android in over 100 countries, including Nigeria. It is not yet available in the EU due to concerns around local data privacy regulations.
The app is linked closely to Instagram. Users are allowed to follow the same accounts they do on Instagram.
– Friendly app
Mr Zuckerberg said keeping the platform “friendly… will ultimately be the key to its success”, prompting Mr Musk to respond by saying: “It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram.”
Asked whether Threads will be “bigger than Twitter”, Mr Zuckerberg said: “It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it,” BBC reported.
“Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”
Meta said Threads released on Thursday was the “initial version”, and that additional features including the ability to interact with people on other social media apps like Mastodon, will come.
“Our vision with Threads is to take what Instagram does best and expand that to text,” the firm said prior to its launch.
– Learn more
The release of the new app comes after criticisms of Meta’s business practices. Last year, Frances Haugen, a whistle-blower from Meta, exposed the company’s prioritization of profits over safety and raised concerns about the platform’s moderation.
Meta also faced a scandal involving the unauthorized access of Facebook users’ personal data by third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, a British political consultancy.
In an apparent reference to Meta’s controversial past, Twitter CEO Mr Musk remarked on Monday, “Thank goodness they’re so sanely run.”
On Saturday, Mr Musk limited the number of tweets users could see on his platform per day, citing concerns about excessive “data scraping.” Twitter also announced that its popular user dashboard, TweetDeck, will be placed behind a paywall in 30 days.
Both moves are seen as part of Mr Musk’s efforts to push users to subscribe to Twitter Blue, the platform’s subscription service to increase the platform’s revenue.
Threads is seen as having the advantage to succeed in displacing Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon, because it is connected to Instagram, and the hundreds of millions of users already on that platform.
UPDATE: This article has been revised to correct a sentence that indicated that Threads is currently unavailable in Nigeria.
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