Paul Stenhouse: Instagram's Threads is the fastest growing app, ever?

Meta says 70 million people have now signed up for Threads and there have been over 90 million posts. It took Twitter four years to build that audience.  
 

Elon is now threatening to sue Meta, alleging Meta has copied Twitter, saying  "competition is fine, cheating is not". But he's in for a hard time because copyright law doesn't protect ideas, and Meta has a patent for its newsfeed. If anything, it means Meta could counter sue Twitter - which is exactly why these companies patent things like this even if they never really expect to enforce them. 

Jane Manchun Wong - who is famous in tech circles for uncovering unreleased features in Twitter (and other apps) as they're being developed - is now working for Meta on Threads. 

Meta is really pushing the safety and community aspect of this app 

Meta says they want it to be a "friendly" place for conversation but I still don't see how they plan to make that happen. Instagram's boss says they're not going to do anything to encourage politics and “hard news" - but that won't stop people publishing their thoughts about it? Yes, Meta has more moderation policies, more tech to enforce them, more people to manually review content - but that doesn't inherently make it a safer place. Is Twitter a less safe place than Facebook today? 

What's next? 

Instagram is working on a feed just for people you follow and a chronological feed - which is going to make it a LOT more usable. Right now the feed seems to display random content without rhyme or reason - I certainly can't pickup a theme to what I'm getting. 

Hashtags, trending topics and more are also in the works. 

They'll also add proper fediverse / activity pub support - which will could open the door to account portability, and even interoperability with other Twitter-like services. 

Hopefully a proper web version is coming soon too. At the moment you can only find someone's profile if you know their username - eg. https://www.threads.net/@paulstenhouse 

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