10 million new users join Threads in seven hours

Meta’s new Twitter competitor, Threads, has achieved an impressive milestone by surpassing 10 million signups in just seven hours, as confirmed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a recent thread. Unlike Bluesky, which relies on invite codes, Threads is now accessible worldwide (excluding Europe), highlighting Meta’s remarkable scalability in comparison to other Twitter rivals.

To mark the occasion, Zuckerberg tweeted for the first time in over a decade a classic Spider-Man breakup (proving that, unlike Elon Musk, he actually knows how memes work). “10 million signups in seven hours,” he added on Threads.

With Threads, Meta takes on Twitter and alternatives like Mastodon. It falls under the purview of Instagram CEO Adam Mosser, who plans to make Threads compatible with ActivityPub. This is the source protocol that powers Mastodon and other decentralized services, sometimes called “Fediverse”.

Threads is strongly tied to Instagram and built on the same platform, giving Metal an effective way to promote it. All users who pre-ordered the app on iOS received a push notification when Threads launched, another move that undoubtedly increased sign-ups.

However, the site is not without early teething problems. The biggest complaint is the lack of chronological, next-only feeds, leaving users stuck with whatever the Threads algorithm decides to go with. (“95 percent of the posts I see are completely irrelevant to me,” complained one user). It also lacks post editing (which Facebook and Instagram both have), hashtags, account switching, and more.

Mosseri has addressed all of these issues and posted in Threads that only the following feature is “on the list”. He said the same about editing posts and switching accounts, adding that hashtags can be clicked “in time.”

Another key issue for many users is the lack of a web version of Threads. Just like Instagram was for a long time, Threads is read-only in browsers, and posting is limited to iOS and Android apps (Mosser hasn’t addressed this yet). Finally, the design of Threads seems to be a love-it-or-hate affair, with some users finding the layout less intuitive than Twitter.

Authentication is still an important topic of discussion. Elon Musk famously changed Twitter’s system so that only Twitter Blue subscribers (or very prominent public figures and news sites) would receive a blue checkmark. This made the experience less enjoyable for many users as it was difficult to tell who was an official athlete, celebrity, journalist, etc.

So far, only users verified on Instagram (and not Facebook) have received a blue badge in Threads. While Instagram verification is notoriously harder to come by, it is largely held by influencers and content creators. But Threads is positioned as a discussion site and will likely focus on news (if it competes with Twitter), so it might make sense to allow Facebook-verified users to verify on Threads — or create an entirely new verification system.

Either way, it’s still early days for Threads, and the app will no doubt change significantly in the near future. It’s clear that users have strong opinions – whether or not Meta listens to them will be an interesting story over the next few months.