Meta’s Threads app is here to challenge Twitter

Threads, Meta’s text-based app to challenge Twitter, is now official. Mark Zuckerberg announced the new service a day before the July 6 launch date that appeared in app stores earlier this week. Meta has begun rolling out the new service worldwide, although it won’t be available in the EU until the company addresses 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” that relies on users’ Instagram credentials, but will eventually be compatible with a wider range of decentralized services like Mastodon. For now, Threads users log into the app and website with their existing Instagram account. The company will “port”[ads1]; existing usernames and verification status to Threads, although users have the option 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 has been tests quietly the service with a small group of celebrities and creators, as well as its own employees, so that new users are not met with an empty social network.

The service itself looks remarkably similar to Twitter, although the design will feel familiar to Instagram users. It supports text posts of up to 500 characters, as well as images and videos of up to five minutes. Threads will also support reposts – its version of a retweet – as well as quote posts. Users can also limit their responses, block and report other users. And posts from Threads can easily be shared to users’ Instagram Stories for added visibility.

The launch comes at a particularly chaotic moment for Twitter, just days after Elon Musk announced strict rate limits 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 going back. Musk, who has complained about AI companies training their platforms on Twitter data, blamed both unpopular moves on “data scraping.”

With Threads, Meta is challenging not only Twitter, but 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 work with ActivityPub to give you the ability to stop using Threads and transfer your content to another service,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Our vision is that people using compatible apps will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads account, and vice versa, ushering in a new era of diverse and interconnected networks.”

As Meta explains, this means that users from Mastodon and other services that support ActivityPub will be able to follow and interact with public posts on Threads. (Private accounts on Threads will still be able to manually approve new followers from other services.) And other developers may one day create their own Threads-compatible features and services.

Currently, it is not clear how long it will take for Meta to fully integrate ActivityPub into threads. In an early post about the service that was briefly visible before its official launch, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said the company was “committed” to the protocol, but gave no timeline. It’s also not clear how ActivityPub integration might affect content moderation and other security issues. While Meta’s Threads app has the same content moderation guidelines as Instagram, services built by other developers can set their own standards and guidelines, just as different bodies on Mastodon have their own guidelines and norms. Meta notes that this will give users “the freedom to choose rooms that align with their values.”

At the moment, the biggest question facing Threads is whether it has a chance to become a viable Twitter alternative. Since Musk took over the company last year, Twitter users have flocked to alternative platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, T2 and others. But so far, no one has achieved anything close to the scale of Twitter, much less Meta. But with more than 1 billion Instagram users, Zuckerberg and Meta clearly hope they can gather momentum much faster than other decentralized upstarts.

“It will take some time, but I think there should be a public conversation app with 1 billion+ people on it,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Threads shortly after its launch. “Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t been able to. Hopefully we will.”

Update July 5, 2023, 5:15 pm PT: This story has been updated to quote a post from Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads account.