Meta's Threads garners 5 million signups in first few hours

Instagram's highly anticipated app, Threads, that is set to rival Twitter, has officially launched and within the first four hours of it going live, has surpassed five million signups, according to a post on the platform by Meta's founder, Mark Zuckerberg. 

Threads is an app that was built by Instagram and that will largely function similarly to Twitter. It will allow users to post text-based posts that other users can then comment on, share and like. 

According to Meta in a statement, Threads offers a new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations. 

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"Instagram is where billions of people around the world connect over photos and videos. Our vision with Threads is to take what Instagram does best and expand that to text, creating a positive and creative space to express your ideas," said Meta. "Just like on Instagram, with Threads you can follow and connect with friends and creators who share your interests – including the people you follow on Instagram and beyond. And you can use our existing suite of safety and user controls.

All users need to do is use their Instagram accounts to log into Threads. Your Instagram username and verification will carry over, with the option to customise your profile specifically for Threads. 

Everyone who is under 16 (or under 18 in certain countries) will be defaulted into a private profile when they join Threads, said Meta. You can choose to follow the same accounts you do on Instagram, and find more people who care about the same things you do. The core accessibility features available on Instagram today, such as screen reader support and AI-generated image descriptions, are also enabled on Threads.

Your feed on Threads will include threads posted by people you follow, and recommended content from new creators you haven’t discovered yet. 

Posts can be up to 500 characters long and can include links, photos, and videos up to five minutes in length. "You can easily share a Threads post to your Instagram story, or share your post as a link on any other platform you choose," said Meta.

Safety is also a major concern on Threads and Meta noted that it built Threads with tools to enable positive, productive conversations. You can control who can mention you or reply to you within Threads. Like on Instagram, you can add hidden words to filter out replies to your threads that contain specific words. You can unfollow, block, restrict or report a profile on Threads by tapping the three-dot menu, and any accounts you’ve blocked on Instagram will automatically be blocked on Threads.

Meta added that it has plans to make Threads compatible with ActivityPub, the open social networking protocol established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body responsible for the open standards that power the modern web.

This would make Threads interoperable with other apps that also support the ActivityPub protocol, such as Mastodon and WordPress – allowing new types of connections that are simply not possible on most social apps today. Other platforms including Tumblr have shared plans to support the ActivityPub protocol in the future. 

"We’re committed to giving you more control over your audience on Threads – our plan is to work with ActivityPub to provide you the option to stop using Threads and transfer your content to another service. Our vision is that people using compatible apps will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads account, and vice versa, ushering in a new era of diverse and interconnected networks," it said. 

Meta added that if you have a public profile on Threads, your posts will be accessible from other apps, allowing you to reach new people with no added effort. "If you have a private profile, you’d be able to approve users on Threads who want to follow you and interact with your content, similar to your experience on Instagram."

"The benefits of open social networking protocols go well beyond the ways people can follow each other. Developers can build new types of features and user experiences that can easily plug into other open social networks, accelerating the pace of innovation and experimentation."

"Each compatible app can set its own community standards and content moderation policies, meaning people have the freedom to choose spaces that align with their values. We believe this decentralized approach, similar to the protocols governing email and the web itself, will play an important role in the future of online platforms."

Threads has now been rolled out in more than 100 countries for iOS and Android, and people in those countries can download the app from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. 

The launch comes as Twitter users see increasing frustration with ever-changing rules and restrictions on the platform. 

Just this week, Twitter's CEO revealed that the platform put at temporary limit on the number of tweets users can see per day to address the "extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation," according to Musk in a tweet. He added that he also set a view limit because "we are all Twitter addicts and need to go outside".

As a result, verified accounts world be limited to reading 6,000 posts a day while unverified accounts would only get 600 posts and new unverified accounts would get 300. These amounts were expected to increase to 8,000, 800 and 400 respectively, according to Musk in an updated tweet. 

The move caused significant upset among users who responded to Musk's tweets saying that Twitter was now dead, and that Musk was forcing users to pay for Twitter Blue, a paid monthly subscription service on the platform that allows users to subscribe, and thus access, a more premium version of Twitter.

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