The rush to replace the crumbling town hall of Twitter is on and Threads, a new social media product from Instagram, has lept to a leading position.
Launching Thursday morning, the text-based “Twitter killer” companion to IG is already putting up numbers. According to Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, the app has accrued more than 30,000,000 users in just the first half of launch day. “Wow, 30 million sign ups as of this morning. Feels like the beginning of something special, but we’ve got a lot of work ahead to build out the app,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on the app, where he is currently almost exclusively using the new social network to update users on the size of its base.
Though it had likely been in development for years, Threads was only officially announced on Wednesday, just a few days after Meta began teasing the app. The timing of the launch is convenient and probably quite intentional, as Twitter undergoes its latest round of backlash, following CEO, Elon Musk’s announcement of new viewing limits for users over the weekend. Threads wasn’t the only beneficiary of Musk’s perpetual mishandling of the once-beloved social platform. Other competitors like BlueSky (a decentralized social product from Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey,) Mastodon, and more recently, Spill, have all seen an influx of new users fleeing the chaos and unpredictability of Musk’s reign over the platform. But, mostly due to Meta’s resources, none have managed to give Twitter as much of a run as Thread.
The app store is just the latest venue for the mounting tensions and rivalry between Musk and Zuck. Just last month, Musk challenged his fellow tech mogul to a real-life cage match. And UFC chief, Dana White, is doing everything in his power to bring the billionaires to blows. A date and time have yet to be set, but it appears White is working out the details.