“Here we are. Welcome to Threads,” with those words Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg launched the new Thread app on Wednesday night (local time). The message has already received several thousand “likes” on his profile in a few minutes.
Zuckerberg announced on his personal page that four hours after its launch, the new social network had registered five million users. Three hours later, this number has already doubled.
The site is immediately seen as the biggest competitor to Twitter, which itself has drawn regular criticism from users since billionaire Elon Musk took over the social medium last year. It also saw the disappearance of many advertisers.
Not yet in Europe
The app has been launched on Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries. At the moment, themes are not available in the EU yet. According to the US social media company, this is due to the ambiguity surrounding European regulations. Thread accounts already exist for celebrities like Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, and Hugh Jackman, as well as media companies like The Washington Post, Reuters, and The Economist.
Topics will be linked to the Instagram and Meta photo and video app. This allows users to bring their followers and watchlists from Instagram to Thread. The app’s arrival was announced earlier this week. The news came just days after Twitter announced a “temporary” limit on the number of messages users can read. This decision was made possible because of the AI companies that would pull data from Twitter at scale to train their language models.
