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Meta’s Threads Has 70 Million Signups, Surprising Zuckerberg​


By
Natalie Lung
July 7, 2023 at 12:26 PM EDT

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Meta Platforms Inc.
’s new social media app Threads has garnered 70 million users in just two days after its launch, a sign of enthusiasm that Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said was “way beyond our expectations.”

Threads launched on Wednesday as an alternative to Elon Musk’s Twitter, which had 237.8 million users as of July 2022, but has also been beset by controversy. On Threads, which closely resembles Twitter’s look, people can post text and links and reply to or repost messages from others. The app will let users port over their existing follower lists and account names from Instagram, Meta’s photo and video-sharing app that counts major brands, celebrities and creators among its more than 2 billion users.

Threads is currently ranked No. 1 among free apps on Apple Inc’s App Store in the US.

“70 million sign ups on Threads as of this morning, ” Zuckerberg said in a post on his Threads account. “That’s way beyond our expectations.”
 

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Threads isn’t for news and politics, says Instagram’s boss​


/

Adam Mosseri ran Facebook’s News Feed in 2016, and now he tells Alex Heath that politics and hard news aren’t ‘worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks.’​

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.
Jul 7, 2023, 2:16 PM EDT

An image showing the Threads logo

Illustration: The Verge



Instagram’s new Threads app is “not going to do anything to encourage” politics and “hard news,” Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said in a Threads conversation with The Verge’s Alex Heath.

The additional scrutiny, negativity, and integrity risks that come with politics and hard news aren’t worth the “incremental engagement or revenue,” Mosseri wrote.
“There are more than enough amazing communities — sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment, etc. — to make a vibrant platform without needing to get into politics or hard news.” (Mosseri’s strong point of view here is likely informed by his time running Facebook’s News Feed.)

In recent years, Meta has distanced itself from news and politics, including reducing the amount of political content that users see on Facebook. It even dropped “News” from the name of the Facebook Feed last year. The company also responded to a new Canadian law that would require it to pay for local news by saying it will yank news from Facebook and Instagram in the country.

While Threads is assuredly a take on Twitter, a platform tying itself in knots under new ownership, Mosseri is apparently thinking much bigger. Following along with his boss, Mark Zuckerberg's statement about finding a “clear path to 1 billion people,” Mosseri said:

The goal isn’t to replace Twitter. The goal is to create a public square for communities on Instagram that never really embraced Twitter and for communities on Twitter (and other platforms) that are interested in a less angry place for conversations, but not all of Twitter.


Threads launched on Wednesday and has proven to be a big hit; it’s already surpassed 70 million signups. But the vibe, so far, is decidedly not like what you might be familiar with from Twitter: the only available feed is an algorithmic one, and that feed is already flooded with celebrities and brands.
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Still, it seems inevitable that politics and news will trickle onto Threads in some way, especially if politicians and journalists use the platform during the 2024 presidential election cycle. And Instagram is working on a feed just for people you follow and a chronological feed, which, at least for me, should make Threads a much more useful place to find news. But it sounds like Instagram won’t be going out of its way to make Threads what Twitter once was — so don’t get your hopes up for some kind of Thread-Deck.
 

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As Threads soars, Twitter rival Bluesky hits its first million installs​

Sarah Perez@sarahintampa / 9:00 AM EDT•July 7, 2023
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Blue sky with clouds illustration, representing Bluesky social

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

As Instagram’s new Twitter rival Threads soars into the double-digit millions after launching on Wednesday, another Twitter alternative, Bluesky, has hit a milestone of its own. According to new analysis from app store intelligence provider data.ai, Bluesky has now topped a million downloads across iOS and Android, despite remaining an invite-only app.

Of course, this metric pales compared with the numbers Threads is putting out as an app that’s tied into Instagram’s social graph. And it’s far from catching up to Twitter itself, which added another 72 million first-time installs while Bluesky was working toward its first million. That’s an average of 518,000 new downloads per day for Twitter, data.ai notes. By comparison, Bluesky only sees 8,300 first-time installs per day, on average.

That said, it’s still solid growth for an app where invites remain scarce and, sometimes, unusable — the company even temporarily paused sign-ups during the first weekend in July after Twitter’s decision to limit the number of readable tweets drove new demand for Twitter alternatives. The Bluesky team was worried the record-high traffic would result in performance issues as it wasn’t yet ready for such a large influx of new users, they explained at the time.

In fact, data.ai reports that the move by Twitter allowed Bluesky to hit its new milestone, as an estimated 300,000 new Bluesky installs were registered since June 30.

IMG_6545.jpg

Download numbers of Bluesky Social app over the last few months. Image Credits: Data.ai

The U.S. accounts for the largest number of Bluesky installs, or 40%. That’s followed by Brazil (9.5%), Japan (8.5%), Thailand (7.5%) and the United Kingdom (4.6%).

In total, it’s taken Bluesky roughly four months to hit the “1 million+” downloads milestone. But it’s likely the app would have seen a faster rate of adoption had it fully opened up to the public. The team’s decision to keep its app private may ultimately hurt its potential success now that Threads is out and promising to integrate with ActivityPub — the protocol powering the open source, decentralized social network Mastodon, another popular Twitter alternative. Bluesky, meanwhile, is developing its own decentralized social networking protocol, the AT Protocol.

Though it’s already faced moderation challenges, Bluesky can’t be counted out yet. The company this week announced $8 million in seed funding and its first paid service, custom domains, as it looks outside the traditional ad-supported market to find a means of monetization.
 
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