The Twitter competitor is here: Facebook group Meta publishes threads

The Facebook group Meta has launched its Twitter competing app Threads. The application was released Thursday evening in the United States and dozens of other countries.

Discussions will initially not be available in European Union (EU) countries – the group points to regulatory issues that are still open.

Threads is linked to Meta’s popular photo and video app Instagram and is considered the most promising competitor to the short message service Twitter. The reason is an edge: Meta can use existing connections between hundreds of millions of users for its Twitter copy from the start.

Other Twitter competitors such as Bluesky and T2 require such links to be created from scratch. However, in the EU, merging data from different services can be a problem.

Twitter with problems

Twitter has been struggling since it was acquired by tech billionaire Elon Musk in October 2022. Among other things, the advertising revenues used to finance the short message service collapsed.

Recently, Musk introduced limits on the number of tweets users can see per day. According to him, this is intended to prevent Twitter data from being extracted, including for training software with artificial intelligence. Customers with a Twitter subscription can see a maximum of 10,000 tweets per day and users without a subscription can see a maximum of 1,000 (sda/dpa)