Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, has made a history of copying features from other platforms. This time, Meta has launched Threads, a social media app connected to Instagram that works more likeTwitterand should eventually connect toMastodon.
Meta, as the maker of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has been after Twitter for many, many years. The company attempted to buy Twitter back in 2008, but that didn’t work out. Last year,Elon Musk acquired Twitter, and then promptlyran it into the ground. That has led to a surge in popularity for Twitter-like platforms, and now Meta’s take is live.
It was intended to launch today, but Meta made a surprise early launch in the afternoon yesterday. And so far, it’s actually seeing plenty of adoption, with the platform getting up to 20 million users within the first hours of launch. However, many of those accounts are brands instead of actual people. Instagram’s user base is in the billions, so we can only expect this number to keep going up as time goes by. However, it’scurrently restricted from the European Uniondue to its privacy problems – this is the same company that gave us Facebook, so that checks out.
As it keeps growing, we can also expect a number of other changes, too. Threads is supposed to play nice with Mastodon and the Fediverse, and it will be getting ActivityPub support down the road. The exact degree to which Mastodon and Threads will be interoperable remains to be seen, but you’ll be able to follow and interact with Mastodon users from Threads. Likewise, Mastodon users will be able to follow Threads users by using their full username, such as “@john@threads.net.”
If you want to give it a spin, Threads is now available from theApple App Storeand theGoogle Play Store.
