Well, it’s no cage match but Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta dropped Threads, a rival app to Elon Musk’s Twitter. And we decided, heck, Why not give it a whirl?
Threads — not to be confused with the 1984 feel-really-bad movie of the same name — looks almost exactly like Twitter, with short text, photo, and video posts that you can like, repost, comment on, or share.
Instagram’s Adam Mosseri told The Verge that, while Twitter “pioneered the space,” Meta felt there was an opportunity to build something new “given everything that was going on.”
What’s going on?
Ever since Elon Musk’s $44B takeover of Twitter, the platform’s been different.
Recently, Musk capped the number of tweets unverified users can see, sending a deluge of new users to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s app Bluesky (which just raised $8m, btw.)
Mastodon and Spill, a Black-owned app founded by ex-Twitter employees, experienced similar surges. By press time, Threads had courted 30m+ users.
If Threads looks like a Twitter clone…
… how does it differ?
It’s linked to Instagram, so you need an Instagram account to sign up. From there, you can import your Insta bio and people you follow.
So, if you, like me, use Twitter for work/community stuff and Insta for posting your cats, it may kick off on a different vibe. Also:
- Threads’ character limit for posts is 500, versus Facebook’s 63k+ and Twitter’s 280 for nonpaid users or 10k for Twitter Blue subscribers.
- So far, there’s only one feed, consisting of posts from people you follow and recommended content.
- It doesn’t have account switching, hashtags, DMs, search, paid ads, or a desktop version… yet.
- It’s currently unavailable in the EU due to concerns surrounding privacy regulations.
- It has the same community standards as Instagram, so no NSFW stuff.
On the fence about Threads? Maybe think on it, ‘cause you can’t delete a Threads account without sacking the associated Instagram account.
