Mark Zuckerberg gave Elon Musk’s Twitter an upper-cut punch a day early. Threads, a new app from Meta, came out today. Zuckerberg announced that the new Instagram-based app “for text updates and public conversations” is available for iOS and Android in more than 100 countries.
Users can log in to their Instagram accounts, and things like their usernames and settings for verification will remain the same. You can also change things and make a whole new page. People who don’t have an account won’t be able to see Threads posts, and users won’t be limited to how many posts they can see at once like Twitter recently did.
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Users’ feeds on Threads are filled with “recommended content” from Meta and the people they follow.
Users can post up to 500 text characters, more than Twitter’s limit of 280. They can also post links, photos, and videos up to five minutes long. Threads posts can also be shared as a link or added to an Instagram story.
“Our vision is that Threads will be a new app more focused on text and dialogue, modeled after what Instagram has done for photo and video,” said a spokesperson for Meta.
Instagram has almost all the same features, like a screen reader, AI-generated picture descriptions, public or private account settings, and safety features like blocking, reporting, and restricting. Any accounts that were blocked on Instagram will also be carried over.
People who join Threads and are under 16 or 18 in some countries will have a private page by default.
A representative for Meta said in an email that soon there will be more features, such as better suggestions in the feed and changes to search.
As promised, the app will work with ActivityPub. This means that Threads can connect to open-source social networks like Mastodon. Other apps will also be able to get to public accounts on Threads.
The spokesperson also said that this helps developers build new features and makes it easy to “plug into other open social networks,” speeding up testing and innovation. Compatible apps will make rules for the group and how to moderate content.