Meta’s Threads App Launches to Compete with Twitter

Threads, the text-based app by Meta, has been officially launched to compete with Twitter. Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement a day before the scheduled July 6th release, which was already visible in app stores earlier this week. Meta has started introducing the new service globally, but it will not be accessible in the European Union until the company resolves any potential regulatory issues.

In a blog post announcing the Twitter competitor, the company described Threads as “a dedicated space for real-time updates and public conversations” based on users’ Instagram credentials, but eventually 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 “migrate” existing usernames and verification status to Threads, although users will still have the option to edit their profiles.

Like Instagram, the company relies heavily on recommendations to help people find new accounts to follow. And Meta has quietly tested the service with a small group of celebrities and creators as well as its own employees, so new users are not greeted with a blank slate with the social network.

The service itself looks remarkably similar to Twitter, although its design will feel familiar to Instagram users. It supports text messages of up to 500 characters, as well as photos and videos of up to five minutes. Threads 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 threads from Threads can be easily shared on users’ Instagram Stories to increase visibility.

The launch comes at a particularly chaotic time on Twitter, just days after Elon Musk announced strict price caps that severely limited the number of posts many users could view on the platform. The company also stopped showing tweets to logged-out users before quietly backing down. Musk, who has complained about AI companies training their platforms on Twitter data, accused both unpopular moves of “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, an open-source protocol that works with Mastodon and other decentralized services sometimes called “Fediverse.”

“Our plan is to work with ActivityPub to provide you with the ability to stop using Threads and move your content to another service,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Our vision is that people using compatible apps can follow and interact on Threads without having a Threads account and vice versa, ushering in a new era of rich and interconnected networks.”

As Meta explains, this means that users of Mastodon and other services that support ActivityPub can follow and interact with Threads’ public posts. (Private accounts in threads can still manually accept new followers from other services.) Other developers could one day create their own thread-compatible features and services.

It is not yet clear how long it will take for Meta to fully integrate ActivityPub with Threads. In an early message about the service, which was available for viewing shortly before its official launch, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said the company was “committed” to the protocol, but did not provide a timeline. It’s also not clear how the ActivityPub integration could affect content monitoring and other security issues. While Meta’s Threads has the same content moderation policies as Instagram, services built by other developers can set their own standards and policies, just as different instances of Mastodon have their own guidelines and norms. Meta states that this gives users “the freedom to choose modes that match their values.”

However, the biggest question for Threads right now 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, let alone Meta. But with more than a billion Instagram users, Zuckerberg and Meta are clearly hoping to gather momentum much faster than other decentralized upstarts.