What is Threads? Meta’s ‘Twitter killer’ just hit 100 million users!
The new ‘Twitter killer’ from Meta just surpassed 100 million users! Musicians, time to sign up if you haven’t already.
Threads is a new social networking app from Meta, specifically the Instagram team. Launched just five days ago, Threads has already passed 100 million users!
Primarily for text posts, Threads differentiates itself from Instagram with a focus on conversations, though does support photos, videos and links. Posts can contain up to 500 characters, while videos can be up to 5 minutes in length. It’s super easy to share any Threads post to your Instagram story, feed or other platform as a link.
The home screen shows users a feed of threads from those you follow and recommended content from new creators.
How to sign-up to Threads
Rolling out in more than 100 countries, Threads is available on iOS via the Apple App Store and Android via the Google Play Store.
For personal and business users already on Instagram, it’s super easy to set up your Threads account. Simply login using your Instagram details, and your information, handle, verification and followers can be easily transferred.
Threads has a pretty ingenious method of ensuring creators have a decent follower base from day one. When you sign in for the first time, with a single tap, you can follow all of the same people you already follow on Instagram. This instantly follows all of those already signed up, while those yet to sign up will be followed once they do. If you’d rather not follow all of those you currently follow on Instagram, you can be more selective, by picking and choosing those from Instagram that you’d like to follow.
As on Instagram, you can choose whether your profile is public or private. Those under 16, or 18 in certain countries, will be defaulted into a private profile.
The future of Threads
Meta has shared their plans for upcoming features they are building for Threads, including improved recommendations in feed, a more robust search function to make it easier to follow topics and trends in real time, and support for decentralized, open, interoperable social networking protocol ActivityPub. You can read more about what this means for Threads going forward here.
