Instagram’s new social network for short publications appeared on the Play Store and App Store this Monday (3). The platform called Threads will receive texts of up to 500 characters, photos and videos, similar to the competitor Twitter. The Apple store indicates that the launch is scheduled for this Thursday (6).
Threads comes on the heels of criticism of Twitter after Elon Musk announced a daily limit on post views. Under the name of Project 92, the platform was built based on Instagram’s source code.
Users of the new app will be able to bring their followers from the social photo network and the verification stamp, if they have one. Instagram has about 2 billion users, according to the platform’s owner, Meta. That tops the estimated 300 million who use Twitter — which has been impossible to check since Musk bought the network.
“Threads is where communities come together to talk about everything from the topics you care about today to what’s hot tomorrow,” says an excerpt from the app’s description on the Play Store. The disclosure text indicates that the platform will work with the speed of information, as does Twitter. It will also rank the hottest topics.
Questioned by the report about a possible launch date in Brazil, Meta did not respond until the publication of this text.
Elon Musk’s social network has been criticized since the owner announced on Saturday (1st) that users could only see 600 posts a day. On Sunday (2), he increased the limit to 1,000. The measure aims to limit the access of artificial intelligence companies to Twitter content.
On Friday, he had already blocked the viewing of tweets for people disconnected from the social network.
The development of Threads was confirmed to the BBC on 9 June. The first signs of Project 92 were released in March, when Twitter was already losing value, according to Musk himself.
Meta works on an open social network model, along the lines of Mastodon. “We are exploring an autonomous decentralized social network to share text updates,” Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox told the BBC. This means that the application will allow interaction with accounts and publications from other open social networks.
Instagram and Meta have not disclosed whether the social network will facilitate access to publications for developers, as Twitter did before Musk bought it. The technology called API supports academic research and training of language models based on artificial intelligence.
Other Meta apps do not make APIs available to the public.
