The day after Meta’s new social media app Threads launched, Mark Zuckerberg announced to the world that over 30 million people were already on the platform, which is inarguably the greatest launch of any online application ever. And Threads is on a pace to exceed 100 million users within two months, a feat achieved only once before, by ChatGPT, according to the analytics firm Similarweb.
“This is as good of a start as we could have hoped for!” Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads on Thursday. He later added, “Feels like the beginning of something special.”
Threads is, of course, the biggest challenger to Twitter’s dominance as the text-based public forum. Since Elon Musk bought Twitter last year, he has angered the social platform’s longtime users, especially those who do not care for his carefree and right-wing approach to content moderation.
What makes Threads so potent is its accessibility. Unlike Twitter, if you have an Instagram account, you can sign up for Threads immediately, which is why so many people were able to seamlessly join it. Therefore, Meta’s new platform is entering the game with a high floor, and only a higher ceiling.
But the reception, a far cry from the happy mood on the app itself, was far from joyous.
In a letter dated Wednesday, lawyers for Twitter threatened legal action against Meta, accusing it of using trade secrets from its former employees. Twitter also asked Meta to preserve internal documents relevant to a dispute between the two companies.
“Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Musk tweeted on Thursday.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder, also took a shot at Mr. Zuckerberg’s new app. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 7 Twitter clones,” he tweeted on Thursday.
Other concerns still abound about Meta as a company, such as how it treats data (that’s why Threads is not available in the EU) and the so-called metaverse project that made a lot of buzz at the start and now seems to have been swept under the rug.
Even so, this is the infancy of a potentially boom-or-bust app. Twitter still has the lead in users, after all, with more than 237 million daily ones, according to the most recent public figures cited by the company last year. Zuckerberg’s team has their work cut out for them.
