What Meta’s New ‘Threads’ App is Like
*SPOILER* Threads is just like Twitter, but it’s not currently on fire, and you follow your Instagram friends. That’s about it.
Good morning nerds. Are you curious as to how Meta’s new app works and feels but you don’t want to actually download and use another social media app? Well, then you’ve come to the right place, we downloaded Threads and used the thing so you don’t have to.
The Threads app launched on Wednesday, July 5th in over 100 countries (but not in the EU, more on that later), it was built by the Instagram team for sharing text updates, as well as articles, images, and everything else (just like Twitter). The user interface looks and performs, almost exactly like Twitter, if Twitter had actually paid its server bills, didn’t have crippling debt, kept a staff, and already knew everything about you, your friends, and your family since you joined Facebook in college.
The app seamlessly imports all your Instagram information
Your Instagram profile name, profile image, and bio can be automatically ported over to your Threads account, and you can auto-follow all of your Instagram friends. Yay. 
Right now Thread posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes in length. Get ready to open your feed and see all of your Instagram friends trying to make puns about being on Threads like, “Zuck’s new app is an unveiled Thread to Elon’s Twitter.” (For example)
What Thread is also toting over Twitter is that it will “Turn down the noise”, meaning it will regulate what is said on the platform and in your feed. Unlike Twitter, Thread will censure nudity, hate speech, and god knows what else. META is a company with 3.8 billion users, they have gotten exceedingly good at controlling what you see, and don’t see, and most importantly, what will keep you scrolling.
The Thread UI looks nearly identical to Twitter.
Just like on IG you can, “control who can mention you or reply to you within Threads. Like on Instagram, you can add hidden words to filter out replies to your threads that contain specific words. You can unfollow, block, restrict or report a profile on Threads by tapping the three-dot menu, and any accounts you’ve blocked on Instagram will automatically be blocked on Threads.”
Meta will tell you that this feature is to”protect you”, but what it’s really for is keeping you on the app so they can serve you more ads. Something Elon’s Twitter has proven completely incompetent at doing. Meta on the other hand, is very good at advertising.
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There are no ads on Threads for now, but that will change after Threads does what it came to do, which is kill Twitter and take all its users and ad revenue. Then there will just be TikTok to compete against.
In an interview with The Verge, the Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri was asked why Threads didn’t Launch in the EU, he said, “Threads didn’t Launch in Europe because the complexities with complying with some of the laws coming into effect next year are significant. We don’t want to launch anything that isn’t forward-compatible with what we know and what we think is coming. It’s just going to take longer to make sure not only that it’s compliant but that any claims we make about how we’ve implemented compliance stand up to our very high set of documentation and testing centers internally.”
*Translation: The EU actually has laws that protect personal privacy, and mental health, and protect against big tech monopolies.
Compatibility
There is something a little different technically about Threads, and it’s the “Compatible with Interoperable Networks”.
Meta says Threads will be compatible with ‘ActivityPub’, the open social networking protocol established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body responsible for the open standards that power the modern web. (Zuckerberg and META like some open-source things, they do have deep ‘hacker’ roots).
This would make Threads “interoperable” with other apps that also support the ActivityPub protocol, such as Mastodon and WordPress – allowing new types of connections that are simply not possible on most social apps today. Basically, it encourages web and app development on top of the platform, developers who think they can build something useful on top of Threads, that Zuckerberg will later buy for lots of money so he can control that too.
Right now, Threads is like a popular new theme park, everyone wants to see what’s inside, and new users through the gates are getting that familiar dopamine hit when they see the ‘likes’ ‘follows’ and ‘mentions’ on a fresh platform. What’s key is they get this without having to learn new rules or create a new identity, it’s painless.
Only time will tell if this is the final nail in Twitter’s coffin, or if it’s just a passing trend, like the Zuck’s metaverse, or a new pair of threads.
Threads can be found in the IOS and Android stores.
Howdy! My name is Katy Atchison and I'm an Associate Editor for Broke-Ass Stuart.
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