Meta unveils Threads as ‘pleasant’ various to Twitter

Obtain free Meta Platforms updates

We’ll ship you a myFT Day by day Digest electronic mail rounding up the newest Meta Platforms information each morning.

Meta has unveiled its long-awaited competitor to Twitter in what chief govt Mark Zuckerberg pitched as a “pleasant” various to the struggling social media platform owned by Elon Musk.

The app, known as Threads, is a “text-based dialog app” the place customers are capable of publish posts as much as 500 characters lengthy, and embody hyperlinks, images and movies. As with Twitter, the posts might be replied to, favored or shared by others.

Following its launch on Wednesday Zuckerberg used his personal Threads account to say it had signed up 10mn customers within the first seven hours.

“Let’s do that. Welcome to Threads,” he wrote earlier.

Threads is immediately linked to Instagram, Meta’s fashionable photo-sharing platform with greater than 2bn customers, and is being rolled out in additional than 100 international locations for iOS and Android, the corporate stated.

The launch of the app, dubbed the “Twitter killer” by some customers, poses a direct menace to Musk’s platform. Since Twitter was purchased by the billionaire for $44bn in October, it has lurched from disaster to disaster, irritating customers and massive advertisers whereas teetering on the sting of chapter.

In an earlier publish on Wednesday, Zuckerberg, who just lately accepted a problem to combat a “cage match” with Musk, solid Threads as a extra healthful substitute to Twitter.

“The aim is to maintain it pleasant because it expands. I believe it’s doable and can finally be the important thing to its success,” Zuckerberg wrote. “That’s one motive why Twitter by no means succeeded as a lot as I believe it ought to have, and we wish to do it in a different way.”

Meta has lengthy grappled with issues from teachers and activists that it doesn’t sufficiently police its Instagram and Fb platforms, however over time it has tightened up its insurance policies and invested in elevated moderation.

The rollout comes as Musk, in contrast, has relaxed Twitter’s strategy to moderation, prompting dozens of advertisers to flee and decreasing its $5bn annual revenues by 50 per cent.

Some Twitter customers have sought options to the platform over Musk’s moderation stance and the introduction of an $8-a-month premium service with some options that had beforehand been free.

Over the weekend, Musk provoked frustration from some Twitter customers when he launched momentary limits on the variety of posts customers may view, which he stated was an try and “handle excessive ranges of information scraping [and] system manipulation”.

To date, nevertheless, nascent challengers — similar to Donald Trump’s Fact Social, Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky, and Mastodon — have failed to achieve sufficiently big communities so as to spill into the mainstream.

Meta is understood for cloning options supplied by rival platforms in its pursuit of progress, most notably when it created “Instagram Tales” — a copycat of the disappearing vertical video clips first popularised by smaller competitor Snap. Meta has extra just lately created a short-form video format just like that of ByteDance-owned TikTok known as Reels.

However Threads’ explicit benefit is its hyperlink to Instagram, which permits customers to carry throughout their present usernames and followers from the photograph app, enabling them to immediately have a community.

Nonetheless, the app will not be initially being launched within the EU, its second-largest market by income, resulting from uncertainty round new laws within the bloc.

The transfer heightens the rivalry between two of Silicon Valley’s most outstanding billionaires. Final month, Musk wrote on his platform that he was “up for a cage match” with Zuckerberg, who has just lately rebranded himself as a ju-jitsu aficionado. Zuckerberg appeared to simply accept the problem. It’s unclear if and when the competition will happen.

In an announcement on Wednesday, Meta stated it deliberate for Threads to be appropriate with ActivityPub, an open social networking protocol established by the World Extensive Internet Consortium. This could imply that customers would sooner or later be capable to switch the followings and content material that they’ve on Threads throughout to different apps constructed on the ActivityPub protocol, which embody Mastodon and WordPress.

“Threads is Meta’s first app envisioned to be appropriate with an open social networking protocol — we hope that by becoming a member of this fast-growing ecosystem of interoperable companies, Threads will assist individuals discover their group, it doesn’t matter what app they use,” Meta stated.