Meta competitor on Twitter is off to a good start.
Threads has drawn more than 23 million subscriptions since its launch on Wednesday night, according to the badges that appear on Instagram when people join the new app.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Threads, which launched on Wednesday night, drew 10 million signups in seven hours. And while it still falls well short of the user bases of the major social networks, including Twitter and Instagram, it’s a number that gives the new platform an immediate boost.
Still, it’s far from certain that Threads will ever be bigger or more embedded in news and culture than Twitter.
“It’s easy to get a lot of people to sign up,” Instagram director Adam Mosseri. he said in a teary-eyed video posted from what appeared to be his bed. “It’s hard to build something that people want to keep using. Quite a lot on day one.”
Threads is still a very simple platform that lacks many of the features of Twitter, such as direct messaging. It also only shows people a feed of posts recommended by the app, though Mosseri said in a Threads post that a feed of just people a user follows is in development. Search and hashtags are also in the works.
It is also an open question how the app will be moderated. Released threads with some features that give the user the ability to self-moderate, such as hiding specific words and phrases.
Threads also appears to be a primarily mobile experience, at least for now. Threads can be seen on desktop if a user navigates to a specific user profile or has a link, but there seems to be no way for a user to see their main feed.
Back on Twitter, the threads seemed to be one of the most popular discussion topics from Wednesday night to Thursday morning. according to Trends24, a website that tracks trending topics and hashtags on the platform. Twitter’s own trending topics showed no sign of discussing Threads.
