Thirty million people have already signed up to the new Twitter rival, Threads. The new app is a Meta product and utilises the company’s strong presence on instagram to achieve such an impressive start. Mark Zuckerberg described the app as friendly competition to Twitter, and an attempt to be a more friendly place.
Twitter can not go a day without a new controversy related to its new ownership it would seem, so the timing and initial success of Twitter’s new rival is perhaps not too surprising. While Zuckerberg has described it as friendly competition, Twitter is already threatening legal action.
Threads has much the same premise as Twitter and operates in a similar way, but with some features missing such as direct messaging, hashtags and trending stories. Some users are not happy with the extent of data the app asks for, and others object to the close association to instagram – that requires your account to be linked. In fact the app is only available to download in a hundred countries and not the EU yet.
Twitter has been a place of social discovery for many in its years online – but in the last year in particular has been an ever growing more controversial place. It’s such an open forum, it can be a hard place to find friendship and positivity, and not run into negativity quickly.
We will have to wait and see if Threads can deliver on its promise of being a friendlier social network.
