Millions sign up for Twitter rival of Zuckerberg

The CEO of Meta claims that the application is a “friendly” substitute for the social network run by Elon Musk.

Ten million people signed up for Threads, a newly released social media program from Meta that competes with Twitter, in the first seven hours, according to the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Soon after the platform’s launch late on Wednesday, Zuckerberg wrote on it to say that users will be able to “build something great together” and that it had already had “10 million signups in seven hours.”

Around 100 nations provide Threads in their online stores for Apple and Android, but the EU has yet to receive it due to privacy concerns.

The app has been welcomed as an aggressive rival to Twitter’s hegemonic position in the social media market, which has drawn criticism for a number of changes made to the service after Elon Musk’s multi-billion dollar buyout last year.

When asked if Threads would grow to be “bigger” than Twitter, Zuckerberg replied on the site on Thursday, “It’ll take some time.” However, I believe there should be a public dialogue app with at least 1 billion users.

“Twitter has had the chance to do this but hasn’t nailed it,” he continued. I think we will.

Although Threads will allow users to create messages of up to 500 characters, as opposed to Twitter’s 280, it will still have many features that are similar to those that are already available on Twitter. There is a 10,000-character limit on Twitter Blue, a paid subscription service.

Soon after the app’s release, in response to a Threads post by American businessman Gary Vaynerchuk, also known as Gary Vee, Zuckerberg stated that the development team “are definitely focusing on kindness and making this a friendly place.”

In addition, Zuckerberg claimed that “s**t-posting,” a term used to characterize the kind of online trolling of which Elon Musk is regularly accused, is “not my style personally,” in what appears to be criticism of Musk’s occasionally scathing tweets on Twitter.

Threads has an advantage over standalone social media competitors to Twitter’s throne like BlueSky and Mastodon since it has access to Instagram’s two billion users worldwide, which is owned by Meta. According to statements made by Jasmine Engberg of Insider Intelligence, Threads just needs one in four Instagram users to switch over to the service in order to become as popular as Twitter.

The app’s availability in the EU has not yet been announced because Brussels is concerned about how Meta handles user data on its Facebook and Instagram platforms. The secret to Meta’s customized advertising strategy, which generates billions of dollars in revenue annually, is collecting user data.