How Threads Could Kill Twitter

The announcement of Threads, Meta’s Instagram-Twitter hybrid, had been met with confusion and skepticism. Threads, the latest of Meta’s copycat innovations, faces a long slog in its bid to topple Twitter as the microblogging platform of choice. Threads, which is closely linked to Instagram but is actually a different app, has a major advantage over other Twitter copycats—it already has a huge potential pool of users on Instagram, and those people can choose to follow accounts they already follow on Instagram as they come onto Threads. And, according to a post yesterday from Instagram head Adam Mosseri, Threads will eventually have support for ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, which would let people take their followers to another service if they leave Threads or the app ever shuts down. Threads doesn’t have a trending topics section, and the search feature seems to only bring up accounts, not specific topics or posts, which makes it initially less appealing for anyone following big news events.