After months of rumors, Threads - Meta’s very own Twitter competitor - has finally arrived. The new platform looks similar to Twitter and lets users create text-based posts with up to 500 characters. Taking advantage of its existing user base, Meta decided to link Threads closely to Instagram, allowing users to log in with their existing username and easily follow the same people. It will not be part of the Instagram app, however, as a new standalone app was released for iOS and Android on Thursday.
Threads arrives at a time when Twitter is very much a platform in disarray. Roughly eight months after Elon Musk completed his $44 billion takeover, the controversial billionaire may no longer be CEO of the company, but even in his new role as chief technology officer, he remains the platform’s public figurehead. When Twitter introduced a limit to how many tweets users could read per day over the weekend, it was Musk who announced and defended the changes on the platform, while the new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, remained silent.
Meta is clearly positioning itself to capitalize on Twitter’s moment of weakness, hoping to lure disgruntled users away from the platform. In an all-hands meeting last month, Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox reportedly told employees that creators and public figures had repeatedly asked for a “sanely run” alternative to Twitter, after other Twitter clones such as Bluesky or Mastodon have so far failed to reach mass adoption.
The problems at Twitter have led many users to take a break from the platform, but many still find it hard to imagine a future without it. According to the Pew Research Center, 60 percent of roughly 3,000 surveyed users in the U.S. said that they had taken a Twitter break of at least a couple of weeks in the past 12 months, but just 25 percent of the respondents said that they didn’t see themselves using the platform a year from now. That was before the arrival of Threads of course, which could end up being the alternative that many users had been waiting for. According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Threads had already amassed 10 million sign-ups seven hours into its launch, indicating that there is demand for a “sanely-run” Twitter alternative.
