It’s finally here, Meta has officially launched Threads, the company’s version of twitter and will compete not only with twitter but with Bluesky, another twitter rival backed by Jack Dorsey, who is the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter.
Threads will use your Instagram account for login and will support posting up to 500-character text, photos, and up to 5 minutes videos. Threads is available on iOS and Android in 100 countries, except in EU, since the company needs to iron out the local data privacy regulations.
To signup for Threads, users must have an Instagram account, where their username and verification status will carry over. Threads users can then customized their profile independently.
Under the hood, while it is currently using Instagram infrastructure, Threads will soon offer support for ActivityPub — the same decentralized social networking protocol used by Mastodon and other federated apps. Once ActivityPub takes effect, Threads will be able to widen its reach, as Mastodon’s ecosystem engages 1.7 million active users.
Meta timed the launched of Threads, specially now that Twitter have imposed a number of restrictions including rate-limit and limiting access of twitter account on TweetDeck to verified users only.
This is not the first time that Meta/Facebook tried to copy twitter, in the early days of Facebook, the company took inspiration from twitter the hashtag, verified accounts, Vine, followers and real-time conversation, among others. It’s still too early to know if Threads will be successful in taking the air out of twitter’s space but if the Elon-led twitter continue to implode, Thread may become the twitter replacement.
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