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More than 10 million people have signed up for the long-awaited Twitter feed, Meta said, in what CEO Mark Zuckerberg described as a “friendly” alternative to Elon Musk’s ailing social media platform.
The app, called Topics, is a “text chat app” where users can post posts up to 500 characters long, and include links, images, and videos. As with Twitter, posts can be replied to, liked, or shared by others.
Within hours of its launch on Wednesday, Zuckerberg took to the new app to brag about its user numbers. “Let’s get it done. Welcome to Threads,” he wrote earlier in his first post.
Threads links directly to Instagram, the popular Meta photo-sharing platform with over 2 billion users, and is deployed in over 100 countries for iOS and Android. Currently, users cannot subscribe to Topics without an Instagram account.
The launch of the app, dubbed a “Twitter killer” by some users, poses a direct threat to Musk’s platform. Since the billionaire bought Twitter for $44 billion in October, he has gone from crisis to crisis, frustrating big users and advertisers while teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
In a post on Wednesday, Zuckerberg described Threads as a more useful alternative to Twitter.
“The goal is to stay amicable as it expands. I think it’s possible and ultimately will be key to its success,” Zuckerberg wrote. “That’s one of the reasons why Twitter has never succeeded as much as I think it should, and we want to do it differently.”
Meta has long faced concerns from academics and activists that it does not adequately police its Instagram and Facebook platforms, but over time it has tightened its policies and invested in increased moderation.
The rollout comes as Musk, by contrast, has softened Twitter’s approach to moderation, prompting dozens of advertisers to flee and slashing its $5 billion annual revenue by 50 percent.
Some Twitter users have sought alternatives to the platform over Musk’s moderation and the introduction of an $8-per-month premium service with some previously free features.
Over the weekend, Musk frustrated some Twitter users when he introduced temporary limits on the number of posts users could see. He said it was an attempt to “tackle extreme levels of data scraping (and) system manipulation”.
But so far, emerging competitors — such as Donald Trump’s Truth Social, Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky, and Mastodon — have failed to gain communities large enough for it to catch on with the mainstream.
Meta is known for the cloning features offered by rival platforms in its quest for growth, most notably when it created “Instagram Stories” – a spoof of the disappearing vertical videos first promoted by a younger competitor. Meta recently created a short video format, similar to that of TikTok owned by ByteDance, called Reels.
But the special feature of Thread is its link to Instagram, which allows users to fetch their existing usernames and followers from the Photos app, enabling them to get a grid instantly.
Some users said it helped revive the site once they signed up, avoiding the “cold start” problem of new social platforms.
Unlike early Twitter, which displayed all tweets in chronological order, threads were launched using an algorithmic timeline, prioritizing posts with the most engagement and sometimes showing them to people the user didn’t already follow.
Threads seemed to have little, if any, paid advertising at launch, though many brands have jumped to the new platform.
Meta did not initially launch the app in the European Union, its second largest market by revenue, due to uncertainty about new regulations in the bloc.
The move increases the rivalry between two of Silicon Valley’s most prominent billionaires. Last month, Musk wrote on his platform that he “was ready for a cage match” with Zuckerberg, who recently rebranded himself as a fan of jujitsu. Zuckerberg seemed to have accepted the challenge. It is unclear if and when the competition will take place.
In a statement on Wednesday, Meta said it plans for Threads to be compatible with ActivityPub, an open social networking protocol created by the World Wide Web Consortium. This means that in the future users will be able to port their following and content on threads to other applications built on the ActivityPub protocol, which includes Mastodon and WordPress.
Meta said: “Thread is the first app envisioned to be compatible with an open protocol for social networking – we hope that by joining this rapidly growing ecosystem of interoperable services, Threads can help people find their community, no matter what app they’re using. “.
Additional reporting by Tim Bradshaw and Christina Criddle in London
