New Twitter Rival 'Threads' Attracts 10 Million Users : How It Works And How To Join

Meta - the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp - is looking to take advantage of the chaos surrounding Elon Musk's ownership of Twitter by launching a familiar-looking rival.

Here's everything you need to know about it.

Threads, the long-awaited Twitter rival from Meta, has launched - with 10 million people signing up in the first few hours.

Built by the firm's Instagram team, it's billed as a home for "sharing text updates and joining public conversations".

Its release couldn't be more aggressively timed, coming days after another controversial move by Twitter's incendiary owner Elon Musk forced many people to look for an alternative platform.

With a shamelessly similar look and the billions of Mark Zuckerberg behind it, Threads seems well-placed to challenge "the bird app" in a way the likes of Bluesky and Mastodon haven't quite managed - though a significant market remains unconvinced.

What is Threads?

Threads is designed first and foremost as a place to share public real-time text updates, just like Twitter.

Indeed, you barely even have to squint, and Threads looks just like Twitter - though it does have a different font.

Posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photos, and videos of up to five minutes.

They appear in a timeline, and posts can be liked, reposted, replied to, and shared elsewhere. But posts don't appear chronologically, and there seems to be no way to make it so.

Users will be able to follow celebrities, athletes, and friends, many of whom will have jumped over from Instagram.

It's available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

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