Tell me there’s pent-up demand for a largely text-based information-sharing and social network that is not Twitter without telling me there’s pent-up demand. Just four hours after releasing Twitter competitor Threads to 120 countries, the new social platform from Facebook-maker Meta hit five million sign-ups.
“Just passed five million sign-ups in the first four hours …” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on his personal Threads account.
For contrast, decentralized Twitter rival Mastodon took months to grow by three million, and about a month of “fast” growth to go from six million to eight million.
Zuckerberg now has 310,000 followers on Threads, and growing. Twitter’s Elon Musk has almost 150 million followers on his social platform.
The social platform Zuckerberg launched to compete with Twitter is off to a strong start, and the conflict could continue in a more personal way, as Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Elon Musk look to engage in a cage fight to go along with their business clashes at some point later this year.
The expansion is not without some growing pains, however. Zuckerberg’s own account page does not show any of his threads right now, and the app has had some difficulty coping with the onslaught. It’s been slow to post, and crashed for me and some others today.
That said, the quick growth must come with some satisfaction for Meta, which has launched and been forced to shutter numerous other apps and products including Poke, Parse, Beacon and others. A fast start doesn’t mean there will be lasting success, of course, but this is a uniquely opportune time to launch Threads.
“With Twitter’s current situation, Reddit on fire, and soon-to-be-banned TikTok … Threads has the perfect environment to take the opportunity and grow Meta’s monopoly on social media,” says Manual Sainsily, a futurist and technologist at Unity Technologies, in a post on Threads.
Twitter, of course, recently limited views of tweets due to what CEO Elon Musk said was egregious scraping of Twitter content. Reddit has recently battled with its unpaid subreddit moderators over third-party Reddit apps, and TikTok has been under pressure by some American politicians over its ties to China.
Zuckerberg called Threads “an open and friendly public place for conversation” in a launch video, saying that it takes the best parts of the Instagram experience and “creates a whole new app around text, ideas, and sharing what’s on your mind.”
It also demands a lot of your private data, which he did not mention.
Zuckerberg says he wants to build Threads into a “big and friendly community we all want to see in the world,” a clear dig at Twitter’s sometimes raucous, sometimes rancorous, and occasionally downright nasty conversations.
The Threads experience is currently only available in an iOS app. An Android app cannot be far behind, and the Threads.net website promises at least some sort of web experience as well.
If Meta knows anything, Meta knows how to scale, with billion-plus user networks in Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. So it’s likely Threads will shed its birthing pains soon. However, the Threads app is still fairly—dare I say it—threadbare, with many core features of mature social platforms, such as direct messages, still missing.
Twitter still has far more users with almost 370 million daily active users. So Threads has a long ways to go to challenge Elon Musk’s social platform for scale and live up the size of its Meta siblings.
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