Meta competes with Twitter with its new application. Instagram today announced the early launch of its text-based social networking app, Threads, which allows Instagram users to authenticate with their existing credentials to post short updates, including text up to 500 characters, links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes in length.
Threads is available on iOS and Android in 100 countries, though not in the EU, reportedly due to concerns over compliance with local data privacy regulations. Users can log in with their Instagram credentials, where their username and verification status will be transferred. However, Threads profiles can also be customized independently.
The app's existence was first announced by Money Control and later confirmed by PlatformerMeta presented a preliminary version to employees during a company-wide meeting. Other leaks offered more details about the app's target market of celebrities, influencers and high-profile artists, and its set of planned features.
While Jack Dorsey-backed Twitter rival Bluesky has been gaining popularity in recent months, leveraging its own decentralized protocol, the AT Protocol, Instagram's new app will soon offer support for ActivityPub, the same social networking protocol used by Twitter's open source rival, Mastodon, along with other related and linked applications.
Once that takes effect, Threads will be able to expand its reach, as the Mastodon ecosystem involves 1,7 million active users. But there's no certainty yet as to when exactly Threads will offer this feature.
“We are committed to building support for Activity Pub, the protocol behind Mastodon, in this app. We were unable to finish it for launch due to a number of complications that come with a decentralized network, but integration is close,” Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said ahead of launch. “When asked why this is important, Here's why: I may one day end up leaving Threads, or end up off the platform in general. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience to another server. Having open source can enable that.”
However, the choice also puts Threads in competition with other Mastodon clients, including independent apps like Ivory and Mozilla-funded Mammoth. Flipboard, Medium, and WordPress.com owner Automattic have also invested in the Mastodon ecosystem amid the exodus from Twitter. But Meta's entry into the open and decentralized social web has raised concerns such as being able to plan a strategy of "embrace, extend and extinguish” geared to dominate in this emerging market, similar to how Google got hold of email on the web.
Image: Threads
instagram for your thoughts
Whether Threads will catch on remains to be seen, though it's certainly a good time for Meta to dive into microblogging. However, it's worth noting that Meta doesn't have a good track record when it comes to building successful standalone apps.
Over the years, the company has shut down numerous standalone apps including Hello, Moves, Paper, Poke, Camera, Home, Slingshot, Rooms, Riff, Bolt, Lifestage, Groups, Stickered, Moments, Notify, Bonfire, Lasso, Novi and others, including Boomerang, Hyperlapse, Direct, IGTV, and Instagram Threads, and virtually all of his experiments from his in-house incubator, the NPE team, like BARS, E.gg, Forecast, Collab, Kit, Hobbi, Tuned, and more. .
To access Threads, the Users must first authenticate with their Current Instagram login credentials. The app will then populate with your existing account details such as name, username, photo and followers. Verification will also carry over to the new app.
This integration gives the new Instagram app a boost in terms of subscriptions, which the company alluded to in previously leaked marketing materials, where it noted that with "one tap, anyone can follow the accounts they already follow on Instagram."
Beyond immediate access to your network, another benefit of the app's Instagram integration is that it will transfer users' Instagram block lists. Plus, it operates under the same Community Guidelines as Instagram, making it easy to understand what's allowed and what's not. Users will also be able to toggle which audiences will allow responses to each of their posts.
Instagram has been experimenting with other ways for users to connect besides sharing photos and videos in Reels, Stories, and Feeds, including launching "streaming channels" in February 2023, which offered creators a way to connect. more directly with followers by posting text, images, polls, reactions, GIFs and more in messages to users' Instagram inboxes. Since then, the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, you have been using the function to send product news.
Before the launch of the new app, several developers and engineers had been digging into Instagram's code to figure out how it would work. They detected that the app would support 500 characters, less than Twitter's 10,000 now for paying subscribers, though more than its 280 characters for non-paying users.
The launch of Threads isn't the first time Instagram has experimented with text-based updates for social sharing. In December 2022, the company introduced Notes, a way to leave short 60-character text posts for friends to see right above their Instagram DM inbox. The feature was updated with music sharing support in June. Not to mention, Instagram once released a separate app called Threads, which was kind of like Snapchat. No longer exists.
Privacy challenges in Threads
When Threads appeared on the app store to start downloads a few days before its release, some users noticed that the app collects a lot of user data. According to Apple's list, the Threads iOS app may collect data related to health, finances, purchases, contacts, usage data, browsing history, and other sensitive information.
Unfortunately, this data collection is not really any different from other major social platforms like TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and Meta's Facebook. But with so many apps vying to become the "next Twitter" (if such a thing is even possible), users have more freedom to choose a platform that has less questionable privacy practices. Still, Threads has an advantage in that users' Instagram networks will be incorporated.
With ongoing privacy concerns among the Meta family of apps, Threads won't be launching in the EU, at least not for now. According to reports from The Guardian, Meta sources delayed the launch due to legal uncertainty over the use of data under the Digital Markets Law, which was passed in March. Meta has reason to be wary of this changing EU legislation; in May, the company was fined around $1300 billion for exporting user data from the European Union to the US for processing.
For now, EU users have one less Twitter alternative to choose from. As for those who have access to Threads from the start, users can now decide if they want the Meta family of apps to grab an even bigger chunk of their attention.
