The Threads app launched by Meta which is barely a week old is set to reach 100 million users. It is not very surprising to see this much rush over the threads app as it came at a time when many Twitter users were seeking an alternative to Elon Musk’s controlled Twitter. According to reports, besides the statement made by Elon Musk concerning the Threads app, Twitter has seen a significant drop in users.
Initially, many individuals ran to the Truth social app by Trump Media & Technology Group after Elon Musk placed a rate limit order on how many tweets you can see in a day both as a premium and non-premium user. A rate limit means that users can only view a certain amount of tweets each day. According to the new adjustment, verified accounts can now read up to thousands of tweets in a single day, whilst unverified accounts can only check a few hundred tweets.
In the words of Elon Musk, he said “To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day, Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day, New unverified accounts to 300/day,”
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The app is closely tied to a user’s Instagram account and is strategically positioned as an alternative to Twitter, which Elon Musk purchased last year. The app has experienced a parabolic growth in users joining up for the service days after it was pushed out globally (except in the EU), with new milestones being reached every day. Threads has grown at such a rapid pace since Meta linked the service to Instagram, which has over 2.35 billion monthly active users.
Last week, Meta introduced threads and began assigning temporary “account numbers” to Instagram users who had signed up for the new microblogging service. Because they are delivered to customers in chronological order, these numbers also indicate how many people have signed up for the service. According to a service that tracks these statistics, the number of Threads users surpassed the 99 million mark on Monday.
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Threads, which has only had a number of updates since its launch, currently lacks many features offered on other microblogging platforms such as Twitter and Mastodon. These include private messaging (DMs) and a search tool. Users may now sign up to test beta versions of the Threads app for Android via the Google Play store and check out new features before they are made public.
Also note that because of the close connectivity with Instagram, deleting your Threads account profile will currently result in the deletion of your Instagram account. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri has stated that the firm is working on a solution that will allow users to cancel their Threads account individually. In the meantime, users can cancel their Threads account, which will remove their profile and posts on the network, according to him.
“I’ve been getting some questions about deleting your account. To clarify, you can deactivate your Threads account, which hides your Threads profile and content, you can set your profile to private, and you can delete individual Threads posts – all without deleting your Instagram account. Threads is powered by Instagram, so right now it’s just one account, but we’re looking into a way to delete your Threads account separately”.
The breakneck speed with which Threads is acquiring new users appears to be alarming its birdie neighbor Twitter, which has reportedly threatened to sue Facebook parent Meta for alleged trade secret theft. According to the company, Meta employed staff who had been laid off by Elon Musk after he took over the platform last year and “deliberately” assigned them to work on Threads. On Sunday, Musk also made a disparaging remark about Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, indicating that the rapid ascent of Threads had caused some anxiety at Twitter.
In a letter, Elon Musk’s outside lawyer, Alex Spiro, said that Meta had engaged in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”
“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Spiro wrote in the letter.
“Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Elon Musk tweeted after the successful launch of the Threads application.
While Threads is expected to surpass 100 million users in less than a week, it is unclear how many users will remain active on the network. Meanwhile, according to data provided on Threads by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince (via The Verge), Twitter’s DNS ranking has dropped over the first six months of the year.
The snapshot of Twitter’s major domain’s DNS rating showed a drop from January to July. In the meantime, Twitter is ranked 184 on the Cloudflare Radar Top 200 Domains list. This backs with statistics published earlier this year by SimilarWeb, which revealed that Twitter traffic has been declining since the beginning of the year.
