Mark Zuckerberg had not put a single post on Twitter for more than 11 years, but yesterday he considered that the launch of Threads (threads, in English), the social network that Meta launched as an alternative to Twitter, was worth making a slight foray into the field of the competition. The Facebook founder’s tweet was just a cartoon in which two Spiderman meet, surprised, face to face. A whole allegory of his movement.
The new challenge to Elon Musk’s network – to his relief – is not available to European users due to the strict community policy on data protection and privacy. Meta cannot afford a new fine such as the 1.2 billion euro fine imposed on it by the Irish data protection authority a few weeks ago for illegally transferring data from European citizens to the United States.
Zuckerberg’s next comments were already on Threads. On registering your first 10 million and triple that number: “Wow, 30 million registrations as of this morning. It sounds like the beginning of something special, but we have a lot of work ahead of us to develop the app.” That number of followers was achieved in less than 15 hours. Threads syncs directly with Instagram, so you start with the head start of 1.3 billion potential users.
The union of the two apps has, however, a requirement. Once registered in Thread, if the user cancels their account on this new social network, they will lose the one they had on Instagram. A whole way of making sure that it doesn’t become something fleeting, that the public tries it out and quickly forgets about it, as happens with other applications of this type.
Threads is very similar to Twitter in appearance, although as it is a new app it is, for the moment, simpler. You can write messages of up to 500 characters and add new posts in the same way as threads on the Musk network. For now, messages cannot be edited. You can select which users can see the posts, and those that are in view can reply to, share, quote, like, mute, hide, block, and report content.
The list of data that must be accepted that is transferred to Meta when registering in Threads is quite long and can be a brake for its adoption. In the iOS version, the app collects personal financial, health and fitness information, contacts, user content, browsing history, usage data, purchases, location, diagnostics, search history, identifiers, sensitive data and “other data”. Virtually all mobile activity.
One of the main differences between Threads and Twitter is that the new one will support federated groups, called fediverso , which is the way users are grouped by common interests on platforms like Mastodon, whose groups will later be compatible with the Threads app. Goal although yesterday there was still the possibility of using them. There is also no web version for the computer at the time of launch.
Although Threads is not available in the official app stores of Apple (App Store) and Google (Play Store) for European citizens, there are two methods to use the new Meta messaging network in Europe. The app is not blocked for use in Europe. The company only prevents its download in the official application portals of the community countries. The use of Threads is not blocked according to the geographical location in which it is.
In the case of iOS, you must have an account in the United States application store. This allows you to load the apps and test them directly. Threads already has a Spanish version. For Android mobiles, the procedure is different: you must download an APK file of the app from one of the Internet software repositories and install it.
