Meta officially launches Threads — how are people on Twitter reacting?

Meta launched a new text-based social media platform called Threads on Wednesday, making it a direct competitor with Twitter.

Meta and Twitter have been competitors in the social media industry for some time now. Meta’s photo-based platforms, Instagram and Facebook, have been in the same space as Twitter, but not exactly the same — Threads levels the playing field by offering a text-based platform that can compete directly with Twitter’s format.

What’s different between Twitter and Threads?

According to a press release by Meta, the platform will allow posts with a limit of 500 characters, as well as links, photos and videos up to five minutes long.

This is about double the character limit for Twitter users, who are capped at 280 characters, but still under the 4,000-character limit that paying subscribers of Twitter Blue get, per Forbes. Meta’s video length limit more than doubles Twitter’s two minutes and 20 seconds cap.

How has Elon Musk responded to Threads?

Twitter’s owner has been relatively quiet about the Threads platform since its launch.

He did respond to a tweet of what looks like a screenshot of an email sent in 2018 that a user tagged him. In the screenshot, Musk supposedly wrote, “I just deleted my Instagram. Weak sauce.”

“It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram,” Musk responded.

Will Threads be more popular than Twitter?

Responding to a question about whether Threads will be more popular than Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg. the creator of Meta, said he thinks that “there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it,” reported Business Insider. Twitter, he said, “had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it.”

“Hopefully we will,” said Zuckerberg.

The platform already had more than 10 million “sign-ups” just seven hours after its launch, Zuckerberg wrote on his Threads account.

This number is more than likely due, in part, to the ease of signing up for an account, using a user’s already-existing Instagram handle and password.

How to sign up for Threads

If you have an Instagram account, logging into Threads uses your same username and password from the photo-based platform, with the option to customize the new account.

The app is available to download in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in more than 100 countries, per the release.

Just be forewarned that you can’t delete your Threads account without deleting your Instagram account, per Thread’s privacy policy.

How are Twitter users responding to Threads?

A journalist for The Guardian, Kari Paul, described the app as “a fever dream in which Twitter and Instagram had a more usable brainchild.”

So far, some Twitter users haven’t been impressed with the new platform and seem to be staying loyal to the original platform as they post memes showing people running away from Threads back to Twitter.

A meme about the difficulty of keeping up with the growing number of social media platforms was liked by over 1,000 people.

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