Meta‘s “Twitter killer” Threads is here, and Mark Zuckerberg says it got 30 million signups within its first 24 hours of going live. That’s around 15% of Twitter’s daily active user base.
But it’s not clear if all those signups will convert to active users–and, even more importantly, some of the 30 million might regret signing up, because it turns out once you make a Threads account, you can’t delete it without also deleting your Instagram account.
Why? Well, Meta considers Threads part of a user’s Instagram account, a sort of textual counterpart to Intagram’s photo focus. Meta has said its “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.” (Threads’ TOS, where you can see just how closely the two are entwined, is actually a “supplemental” policy located in Instagram’s help center.)
Subscribe for daily Tubefilter Top Stories
This isn’t to say Threads bars users from posting photos and videos. It’s essentially a Twitter copy in terms of content.
Users can make text posts with up to 500 characters, and can also post photos and videos up to five minutes long. (In case anyone was worried given Instagram’s contentious history with linking out to other sites, you can also post URLs.)
For those who don’t mind the once-you-sign-up-you-can’t-leave aspect of Threads, how’s the rest of the site working out?
People like MrBeast (the first user to reach a million followers on Threads), Mark Cuban, Jake Paul, and Gary Vaynerchuk seem to be enjoying themselves–and other Threads users can see that, since, unlike on Twitter, there’s no way to limit your timeline just to people you follow. Threads’ main feed is more like Twitter’s For You tab, serving up posts it thinks you may be interested in based on your activity. Some users seem to be getting notifications for these posts, too, meaning their phones are buzzing about content from people they don’t follow.
There’s also no way for Threads users to sort their feed chronologically, which is surprising considering how strong the backlash was when Twitter decided to change its feed’s default from chronological to whatever it is now.
On the whole, Meta is trying to create “a friendly place,” Zuckerberg posted (threaded?). “That’s one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently.”
He didn’t say exactly how Meta plans to maintain a “friendly” atmosphere. What it’s not doing, though, is limiting the number of people who can join. That’s given it a strong start compared to other Twitter rivals. With Bluesky, for example–where Twitter founder/former CEO Jack Dorsey is on the board–you can’t join without a signup code from a current user.
Meta, on the other hand, is pushing Threads as wide as possible amidst Elon Musk‘s tanking of Twitter. The site is now live in 100 countries.
