A direct competitor to Twitter, the new Threads network is causing a stir.
After the announcement of new Twitter updates, which limit posting and reading for users who use the application for free, sparked popular outrage, the owner of Meta, a social media and technology company, saw a great opportunity with Threads.
If anyone doubted billionaire Mark Zuckerberg's firepower, he has definitely proven it with this latest venture. Owner of the world's best social networks (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp), Mark's company presents its Twitter clone, Threads, as part of the giant Meta's ambitious plans. Learn more about the launch of the new network throughout the text.
Fight between billionaires
With the launch of the network, Mark Zuckerberg takes on a role he hasn't played in a long time, bringing the hard blow of launching a new social network. He threatens Twitter's dominance with an almost identical application that has already accumulated more than 100 million users in just five days. In comparison, Twitter has about 450 million users. Because of this, the CEO of Meta, left his social media break and began to confront the owner of Twitter, Elon Musk. After more than a decade of silence, the creator of Facebook posted the famous Spider-Man meme on the network, the one that indicates that Threads is very similar to the Twitter.
Elon was so surprised that he offered a tournament to see which of them had the biggest penis. Some also say that the billionaire proposed a fight between the two.
New network
In the case of Threads, more than an attempt by Twitter (which sometimes changes the rules and charges for access to previously free resources), the network is part of a new ambitious project by Meta: decentralization.
At launch, this wasn't talked about much, but Threads supports a standard called ActivityPub. This way, you can also stream content to other services or access and communicate with people on other compatible networks. It's worth mentioning that until then, Meta only allowed interaction with its own platforms. Nowadays, few networks use this standard, the most famous being Mastodon, also similar to Twitter.
However, with Meta using this feature in Threads, the idea is that network members can connect with those on Mastodon, for example. Users on the platform can chat in threads and view each other’s posts. Communication is done using the “@username@threads.net” structure. For Mastodon, the address is “@username@mastodon.social”.
This is something unprecedented for Meta, “losing” control over the user, to invest in connection and technology.
Is it already a success?
It’s still too early to say whether Thread will succeed. Despite reaching a record 100 million users in five days, it raises questions about whether what’s happening to the network is not the same as what happened to Microsoft in the past. The tech giant owns Internet Explorer, the world’s most widely used web browser. But it still raises questions about whether it’s actually any good or just built into the most popular operating systems.
For Meta, the numbers need to be viewed critically in context. One must think about why Threads achieved such astronomical numbers. The reason could be that the network is actually a much better solution than Twitter or because one needs to have an Instagram account to use it.
The network is clearly reaping the benefits of being the new kid on the block. It's also tied to the success of Instagram, but it will be some time before everyone knows if that will continue.
