A rough week for Twitter may have just got even worse. In a well-timed strike amid preparations for his potential fight with Twitter owner Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and the team at Meta have locked in a release date for Threads, their new rival platform.
Elon Musk’s recent announcement that temporary limits on reading Tweets were being put in place was met with some serious backlash. Now, in what appears to be a move to capitalize on users’ disappointment, Meta has pushed forward with their counterpart.
Initial reports of Meta’s new microblogging app emerged in March this year from MoneyControl. In June, a more concrete announcement that described the new platform as “sanely run” sparked rumors of a potential cage fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. To be fair, those were fighting words.
That cage fight has dominated discussion of the topic since, until now that is. Earlier today, the description of the recently published Threads page on the App Store was updated with an impending release date. The new social media platform from Meta will seemingly become available for download later this week on July 6.
Meta’s Twitter competitor ‘Threads’ is expected to release this week pic.twitter.com/1aYb3LygOY
— Dexerto (@Dexerto) July 3, 2023
The description of Threads in the App Store reads: “Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow.”
It will be integrated with Instagram allowing you to log in with your existing account details and automatically follow the users you already do on that platform. Its interface is comparable to other text-focused social media apps like Mastodon or Twitter itself.
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In recent communications with Platformer, Meta said “We’re exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates.”
While information is still scarce, the assertion that Threads will be a decentralized platform suggests that there may be some ability for users to create their own servers with specific functions or rules, similar to Discord or (more loosely) Reddit, though this remains to be seen.
It’s worth noting, given the relative quiet from Meta and Zuckerberg, that while the Threads App may be available for download on the 6th, it may not be fully functional upon release. Furthermore, we may see a staggered rollout, akin to fellow Twitter rival Bluesky, as thousands of users flood to the platform.
Jay Peters at The Verge has suggested that this may be something of a slow start-up for Threads and that people hoping to wash their hands of Twitter completely may be in for a wait.