Meta, Facebook’s parent company has announced it will launch a Twitter rival on Thursday.
The new platform called Threads will be linked to Instagram, also owned by Meta, and is available for pre-order.
Meta described Threads as a “text-based conversation app… where communities come together.”
Threads is currently available for “pre-saving”(opens in a new tab) on the Apple App Store and is showing up for at least some users in the Google Play Store (opens in a new tab) in Europe.
The screenshots in the App Store preview look a lot like a Twitter interface, showing a “thread” (post) with a heart (like), speech bubble (reply), two-arrow loop (repost to your feed), and paper plane icons as well as like and reply counters.
There’s also a preview of a reply-limiting function that divides the potential audience for an individual “New thread” into Anyone, “Profiles you follow”, and “Mentioned only”.
Not only does the App Store page list its name as “Threads, an Instagram app” but users will be able to log in using their Instagram credentials and handle and choose who to follow on Threads from the list of the people they already follow on Instagram.
Analysts see the emergence of Thread as a direct challenge to Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in October and whose ownership of the social media platform has been marked by a series of high-profile changes.
Last month, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and Musk agreed to take each other on in a cage fight – although it is not clear how serious the proposed fight was.
The new app comes after Twitter announced TweetDeck is to become the next part of the company to be limited to users who have paid for verified status.
Tweetdeck, which allows users to manage multiple feeds and searches, will only be accessible to verified users in 30 days, according to a tweet from Twitter Support on Monday evening.
A new version of TweetDeck has been made available with the tweet giving instructions to update.
The announcement follows Musk announcing two days earlier that users were being limited to reading 600 posts a day.
He said the limit, which had been introduced “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation”, had been increased to 1,000 later on Saturday.
The restrictions could result in users being locked out of Twitter for the day after scrolling through several hundred tweets.
Verified users – who have paid for a subscription to Twitter Blue or are considered “notable” – can read up to 10,000 posts daily after initially being limited to 6,000.
