Tell me there’s pent-up demand for a largely text-based information-sharing and social network that is not Twitter without telling me there’s pent-up demand. Meta, the social network created by Facebook, has reached 30 million users in less than four hours since launching Threads, a Twitter-like competitor.

“Just passed five million sign-ups in the first four hours …” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on his personal Threads account last night.

Today was another story.

“Wow, 30 million sign-ups as of this morning,” Zuckerberg updated. “Feels like the beginning of something special, but we’ve got a lot of work ahead to build out the app.”

For contrast, decentralized Twitter rival Mastodon took months to grow by 3 million, and about a month of “fast” growth to go from 6 million to 8 million.

Zuckerberg currently has more than 1.3 millions followers on Threads. Twitter’s Elon Musk has almost 150 million followers on his social platform, but of course that has been growing since June 2009, when Musk joined Twitter.

In the end, it’s clear that Threads, the social network Zuckerberg started to challenge Twitter has gotten off to a great start. Mastodon and Bluesky have fallen behind. The tech titans’ conflict could continue in a more personal way, as Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Elon Musk look to engage in a cage fight to go along with their business clashes at some point later this year.

Threads isn’t without its growing pains. As of last night, Zuckerberg’s own account page did not show any of his threads (that has since been fixed) and the app has had some difficulty coping with the onslaught.

It’s been slow to post, and crashed for me and some others yesterday.

Meta must be pleased with the rapid growth, as it has had to shut down many other products and apps, including Poke and Parse.

A fast start doesn’t mean there will be lasting success, of course, but this is a uniquely opportune time to launch Threads.

“With Twitter’s current situation, Reddit on fire, and soon-to-be-banned TikTok … Threads has the perfect environment to take the opportunity and grow Meta’s monopoly on social media,” says Manual Sainsily, a futurist and technologist at Unity Technologies, in a post on Threads.

Twitter recently restricted views of Tweets, due to what Elon said was an egregious scraping Twitter content. Reddit’s unpaid subreddit moderation staff has had a recent battle with third-party Reddit app developers, while TikTok is under fire from American politicians for its Chinese ties.

Zuckerberg called Threads “an open and friendly public place for conversation” in a launch video, saying that it takes the best parts of the Instagram experience and “creates a whole new app around text, ideas, and sharing what’s on your mind.”

He did not say that it also requires a large …read more

Source:: Social Media Explorer

Author: Aaron