People are flocking to join Threads, Meta's Twitter competitor.
According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who goes on Threads under the handle @zuck, 10 million people have joined Threads in the first seven hours of it being available.
Threads is a Twitter-like short message platform that is, for some reason, tied to Meta's Instagram. It became available in the U.S. and the UK for iOS and Android on July 6, but not the EU, where Meta is still working out how to handle personal data use.
The 10 million signups number, while respectable, is a far cry from Instagram user base of 1.35 billion monthly active users, and Twitter's 335 million monthly active users (both numbers according to Statista). Threads even is trying to entice people from Instagram using badges. But it's a nice start for a service that is essentially a Twitter clone, capitalizing on Musk's erratic leadership of Twitter, where users are being aggressively pushed into paying for the $8 per month Twitter Blue subscription tier.
Zuck was active on Threads after launch. He said that Meta will focus on keeping the platform "friendly," which will "ultimately be the key to its success."
Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk, on the other hand, commented on Twitter that it's "infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram."
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Threads joins the small army of services, both old and new, who are trying to become the next Twitter. The list includes the decentralized Mastodon, Jack Dorsey's (still invite-only) BlueSky, and the freshly launched Spill.
But like all social media platforms, be aware that Threads is tracking you in all sorts of ways.
