Threads (social network)

Threads is an online social media and social networking service operated by Meta Platforms. The service features integration with Instagram and users must register for Threads with an Instagram account. Functionality is similar to X (Twitter), users can post text, images, and videos, as well as interact with other users' posts through replies, reposts, and likes. The application is available on iOS and Android devices; the web version offers limited functionality and requires a mobile app to be installed first. Upon its launch, Threads became the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users in its first five days and surpassing the record previously set by ChatGPT. This early success was not sustained and the user base of the app plummeted more than 80% to 8 million daily active users by the end of July 2023.

After Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, Meta employees explored the concept of introducing text-based functionality to Instagram. This feature, known as Instagram Notes, was rolled out in December 2022. The company subsequently began developing a separate app focused on text-based posts. Development on Threads—internally known as "Project 92"—commenced in January 2023, with the platform officially launching on July 5, 2023. Threads immediately became available in 100 countries (out of 193 UN member states), but until December 14, 2023 had delayed its launch in the European Union as it waited for regulatory clarity from the European Commission regarding the service's data collection policies.

History

Predecessor

In October 2019, Threads was introduced as a separate app available for Android and iOS. This app's functionality resembled that of Snapchat, allowing users to communicate through messaging and video chats. It was integrated with Instagram's "Close friends" feature, so that users could send images, photos, and texts privately to others, and was embedded with Instagram's photo editing system. Instagram discontinued this version of Threads in December 2021, mainly due to most of its features being rolled out on Instagram, as well as low usage compared to other social media applications. Approximately 220,000 users globally downloaded the original Threads app, less than 0.1% of Instagram's monthly active users.

Development and announcement

On April 14, 2022, business magnate Elon Musk attempted a takeover of the social media platform Twitter. On October 27, Musk acquired the company for US$44 billion in an agreement with the company's board. As Twitter's owner and CEO, Musk implemented several changes to the platform, including monetizing the platform's application programming interface (API); his views and policy changes concerned many advertisers, some of whom left the platform. In November 2022, Meta employees started discussing the possibility of creating a separate app for Instagram Notes, an upcoming text-based feature designed for Instagram. That month, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg—seeking to take advantage of the situation—discussed Twitter-like features the company could add to Instagram with the service's head, Adam Mosseri. At the end of the discussion, Mosseri agreed to build a separate app with a planned release date of January 2023.

Amid several layoffs at Meta Platforms, Mosseri and product leader Connor Hayes assembled a team comprising two product managers, two designers, and dozens of engineers from Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram, growing to fifty-six people by the app's launch. The team favored agility, opting to build features, such as searching for content, later. Development began that January under the codename "P92". Moneycontrol obtained information about the app in March, and The Verge published details from an internal company-wide meeting in June. The project, referred to as "Project 92", was described by chief product officer Chris Cox as the company's response to Twitter. Meta Platforms had reportedly secured commitments from some celebrities and was in talks with Oprah Winfrey and the Dalai Lama. Development was completed in five months using the Jetpack Compose framework.

In July, developer Alessandro Paluzzi tweeted about the release of Project 92 on the Google App Store under the name Threads and shared several screenshots of its features; the app was taken down shortly after. On July 3, Threads appeared on the Apple App Store with a release date set for July 6. Additionally, a website for the app featured a countdown clock leading up to the service's launch. Mosseri intended to release the app a week later, but pushed the release date after Musk implemented a rate limit on the number of tweets users could read. The countdown expired on July 5 at 7:00 p.m. EDT after pushing the release date several hours further to account for international app stores, and Threads officially launched in one hundred countries. Meta Platforms is currently awaiting regulatory clarification from the European Commission due to concerns and uncertainties regarding the service's data collection policies. According to Mosseri, the original name was considered to be Textagram, with the runner-up name being Epigram.

Launch

Within a day of its launch, Threads garnered thirty million users, surpassing the previous record set by ChatGPT and making it the fastest-growing platform in history. On the same day, lawyers representing Twitter threatened legal action against Meta Platforms, alleging that the company had used trade secrets to develop the Threads app. After the launch, Mark Zuckerberg broke his 11-year silence on Twitter. He posted a Spider-Man meme to signify the similarity between Twitter and Threads.

On August 22, 2023, Meta launched the web version of the Threads app.

On December 14, 2023, after a 5 month delay due to privacy concerns raised by regulatory firms, Threads was launched in the European Union.

Meta announced that from April 29, 2024, Threads will be temporarily shut down in Turkey. This was due to local rulings on its data-sharing with Instagram.

Appearance and features

Designed as a platform for real-time conversations and sharing, Threads aims to provide users with a similar experience to Twitter. Threads prioritizes public dialogues over private communications, commonly known as microblogging, and is closely linked to Instagram, its sister social networking service. Accompanied by the launch of Threads, Meta announced their vision for the app to be a "positive and creative space to express your ideas". Users can create posts consisting of up to 500 characters of text or 5 minutes of video content (compared to Twitter's 280 characters of text and 2 minutes 20 seconds of video content for non-paying users). However, Threads lacks other common social media features, such as hashtags, trending stories, and direct messaging.

In response to user feedback, Threads introduced a new home feed for posts along with several updates to the social media app. These changes included the capability to edit posts, translation into multiple languages, and an improved user interface for switching between different Threads accounts.

Threads has also introduced a reposting feature which is visible on each users' profile tab and in their following feed.

Threads has the same community guidelines as Instagram, which ban contents such as nudity, sexual intercourse, and recreational drugs.

Possibility of open interoperability

At launch in July 2023, Meta claimed that Threads would eventually support the ActivityPub protocol. This open standard would integrate Threads into a social media "fediverse", allowing data portability, follower portability, interoperability with all social media platforms that also support it, including Mastodon and WordPress.

Starting in early 2024, Meta implemented a few aspects of ActivityPub in Threads, starting with making posts from select Threads accounts accessible by users of ActivityPub platforms. Meta team members said that they would continue this process and support more ActivityPub integration (as possibly only an 'opt-in' feature), taking "the better part of a year.". On March 21, 2024, Threads introduced a "beta" feature which allowed Threads users whose accounts were public to make them visible on the Fediverse, and to see the number of "likes" they had received, but not be notified of boosts or replies.

A faction of Mastodon server admins, some of whom listing their names under the signature campaign "Fedipact", have expressed resistance to ActivityPub-based federation with Threads, concerned that Meta would adopt an “embrace, extend and extinguish" policy, or that Threads' moderation would fail to prevent abusive content aimed at marginalized communities.

Account integration with Instagram

Threads accounts are closely integrated with Instagram accounts. By default, Threads and Instagram accounts share the same username, profile picture, and display name, although the profile picture and display name can be customized. Users can choose which accounts they follow on Instagram will carry over to Threads, either with the other person's Threads account already created or set to automatically follow them once an account is created. Before the EU launch, users who decided to terminate their Threads account had to delete their associated Instagram account as well. As of December 2023, this is no longer the case and users can delete or temporarily disable their Threads account without deleting their Instagram account.

Users are required to have an Instagram account to use Threads. Threads is a companion app to Instagram, and it uses Instagram to authenticate the user's identity and connect with their network.

Device compatibility

Threads is available on mobile clients for Apple's iOS and Google's Android platforms. Threads is also available on web browsers.

Censorship attempts

In Iran, the government has blocked Threads, adding it to the extensive list of censored social media platforms in the country. Despite being subject to censorship by the Great Firewall in China, Threads reached the top four free social apps on the Chinese iOS Apple App Store. The app was removed from the Chinese App Store on April 19, 2024, on government orders. Russia blocked Threads one day after its launch.

Advertising

Threads does not currently contain ads; however, ads are planned to be implemented in the future. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that monetization would not take place until the app had "hundreds of millions" of users.

Userbase

After its launch, Threads grew rapidly, reaching 100 million users after five days. Third-party observers claim that the number of daily active users has dropped by 20% after the initial five days, and that there has been a 50% reduction in user engagement. Moreover, the average time spent on the app is said to have decreased from the July 6 peak of around twenty minutes per user to eight minutes on July 10, four minutes on July 21, and just under three minutes on August 1.

*estimated

Decline in the months after launch

When Threads reached about 105 million users on July 11, 2023, Meta stopped disclosing its numbers of users; subsequent numbers have been approximated through sampling of follower counts. Despite the initial growth in sign-ups, the number of daily active users on the platform fell by 70% by July 17, down from its peak on July 7. On August 3, 2023, CNN wrote that Threads is facing challenges in retaining users and is considering the addition of "retention-driving hooks". By mid-August, the daily number of users on Threads had fallen by over 80%. The number of daily Android users had also fallen by 79% from 49.3 million to 10.3 million. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims that the eventual decrease in users was 'normal', and said he anticipated retention to improve as new features were added to the platform. Threads initially attracted users migrating from Twitter, but retaining those early enthusiasts may be questionable. Although some initial migration barriers might be short-lived, the enduring appeal of established platforms like Twitter poses a significant challenge.

In November 2023, Similarweb estimated that Threads received 49.4 million desktop visits globally for the month, roughly 100 times less than X's 5.9 billion visits. Compared to October 2023, global desktop traffic and Android mobile app usage for X were down 4% and 2%, respectively. Threads' global desktop traffic held flat, but its Android mobile app usage was up 12.8% for the month. In the United States, Platform X's mobile apps had more than 11 times the monthly active users in November 2023 compared to Threads.

Responses

Intellectual property dispute

On the day of Threads' launch, Twitter issued a legal threat against it claiming that it infringes on Twitter's intellectual property rights. In a letter directed to Meta's CEO, Twitter's lawyer alleged that Meta recruited numerous former Twitter employees who had access to Twitter's trade secrets and confidential information. Meta has denied these allegations, asserting that no former Twitter employees are involved in the Threads engineering team. Twitter also asked Meta to honor its robots.txt file and refrain from crawling or scraping its data.

Data privacy

The data collection policies of Threads have garnered criticism, with experts raising concerns about the extensive collection of private data, as well as previous controversies related to Meta's handling of user data.

State media

Threads does not label state media accounts which, according to The Wall Street Journal, has raised concerns about the potential presence of Russian and Chinese government propaganda and disinformation on the platform.

See also

• Bluesky Social
• List of social networking services

References

Further reading

• Belanger, Ashley (July 6, 2023). "Threads attracts 30M users in 24 hours despite design flaws, privacy concerns". Ars Technica. Retrieved July 6, 2023.

External links

• Official website
• Threads on Threads
• Threads on Instagram