Instagram launches Threads to take on Elon Musk's Twitter

Five million Threads sign-ups in first four hours: Mark Zuckerberg

Meta-owned Instagram on July 6 officially launched Threads, a text-based conversation app designed as a direct rival to Elon Musk-owned Twitter.

"Our vision is to take the best parts of Instagram and create a new experience for text, ideas, and discussing what's on your mind. I think the world needs this kind of friendly community" said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a statement.

The Threads app will be available on iOS and Android across more than 100 countries, including India. Zuckerberg claimed that the app has crossed five million sign ups in the first four hours of its launch.

Moneycontrol was the first to report on Meta's plans to launch a text-based app, then codenamed P92, in March 2023.

The app is also expected to support ActivityPub, the decentralised social networking protocol powering services such as Mastodon and other federated apps, Moneycontrol reported at the time.

Instagram stated that it will make Threads compatible with ActivityPub soon, that will make it interoperable with other apps that also support the ActivityPub protocol, such as Mastodon and WordPress.

This is Meta's first app that will be compatible with rival services, enabling users to interact with a broader community beyond Instagram as well as have the option to transfer their content to another service in the future.

"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" it said in a blogpost.

Zuckerberg has also positioned Threads as an "open and friendly public space for conversation", at a time when rival Twitter is imposing curbs on its users, by limiting the number of tweets users can read on a daily basis. Musk recently noted that this move was 'temporary' to address "extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation".

Twitter was also no longer letting users access tweets, user profiles, or comments on the web unless they were logged in to an account, a move that it appears to have eventually backtracked as of July 5.

Although Threads is a standalone app, it is tied deeply into Instagram. One can log in using their Instagram account and post 'threads' of upto 500 characters that can include links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes in length. Users can then share these threads on their Instagram story or any other platform of their choice.

People's Instagram username and verification will carry over, with an option to customise their profile on Threads, the company said.

One can also follow the same accounts they follow on Instagram and get access to the service's existing suite of safety and user controls, it said. Instagram noted that users who are under the age of 16 (or under 18 in certain countries) will have a private profile by default when they join Threads.

In a blogpost, Meta said that users' individual feeds will include threads from people they follow and recommended content from new creators they haven’t discovered yet, indicating that it will be an algorithmic-powered feed.

These features will likely provide Threads an edge over a slew of Twitter-like services to capitalise on the rising trend of Twitter users looking to migrate to alternative platforms even as the social media platform struggles to cope up with the chaos caused under the new owner Elon Musk.

In the months since Musk took over Twitter, several rival platforms have launched or gained traction to attract these people. Among them include Mastodon, Bluesky, Post.news, Spill and T2.