Let Twitter shudder, because the competitor it didn’t have couldn’t exist With the arrival of Instagram Thread, the app launched by Meta to directly rival Elon Musk’s social network. Four days after its release, actually It has more than 100 million users.
This is explained by Quiver Quantitative’s Thread Tracker, although there is something of a “trick”: the app is Instagram’s sister and from what it thinks It’s been relatively easy for the photo-sharing platform’s more than 1 billion users to sign up. In any case, this happens When it had not yet reached Europe, where it was not yet available.
The truth is that practically since its launch on Wednesday, its rise has been unstoppable. Within the first two hours it hit two million users and from there it steadily rose at a rapid pace to millions of new active accounts. In fact, the launch has exceeded our expectations, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained last Friday.
Plus, users don’t just sign up: they post, too. By the end of the week, more than 95 million posts and 190 million likes had already been shared on the app.
Are we, then, facing a serious competitor on Twitter? Time will pass judgment, as the app still lacks basic functionality that many users consider essential. What’s more, it has minimal accessibility options for now, with no way to add alt text to an image for those using screen readers, for example.
Not just that. Search is limited to usernames, there’s no hashtag support, and you can’t post to threads from the web.
Therefore, although there is no doubt that it has started very well in the number of users, its future is still unknown. Also, as Instagram head Adam Mosseri writes, threads are not meant to replace Twitter:
Politics and hard news will inevitably come to the fore, and they are on Instagram to some extent as well, but we wouldn’t do anything to encourage these segments. Politics and serious news are important, and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. But my point is that from a platform perspective, any additional engagement or revenue it may generate isn’t worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or the integrity risks that come with it. There are more than enough amazing communities. – Sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment, etc. – To create a vibrant platform without having to get into politics or serious news.
We’ll see, because Twitter was not born with a preconceived notion of what it is today, and the social network itself will work in its own way depending on the users who use it. feed.
