Celebrities, government officials, businesses, and regular social media users flock to Meta’s recently launched app Threads to interact with their followers, including many Twitter emigrants weary of the controversy surrounding Elon Musk’s boisterous management of that platform.
However, the real question is: Will they remain? Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, announced in a Threads post on Monday that 100 million people have signed up for Threads, a companion app to Instagram, in the five days since it launched.
One of them is Ann Coleman.
The Baltimore-based 50-year-old said she signed up for Threads after learning about the site from a comedian she follows on social media.
She claimed to love Twitter and have used it regularly for more than ten years.
Even her husband was there.
But because of Musk’s political views and the modifications he’s made to Twitter, like upending its verification system, Coleman, a progressive, has been looking to migrate to a new site.
She had already signed up for the decentralized social network Mastodon, but she had trouble navigating it.
Despite liking Threads, she expressed the desire to be able to simply follow all of her Twitter connections there.
It is simpler for active Instagram users to recreate the same level of engagement on Threads because Threads users have the choice to automatically follow the same profiles they do on the photo-sharing app. However, those who are starting from scratch will have to put in more effort.
Michael Evancoe, 28, said he hasn’t used Twitter much since it suspended his personal page for what the social media site said were spam policy violations years ago.
Evancoe, who is currently employed in production, said he supports some of the modifications Musk has made to Twitter, which is why he opened a new account earlier this year.
But he struggled to attract many fans or contacts.
He recently joined Threads and claims that it has allowed him to communicate with users more.
But he hopes Meta won’t be an overbearing moderator on the platform. Evancoe asserted, “I think that would be a disincentive to both interest and engagement as well.
Meta has stated that it will moderate in accordance with Instagram’s content policies.
Some officials have indicated that the business’s goal is not to replace Twitter but rather to provide something more appealing to a wide range of users.
Over the past few days, the company has been promoting the much-hyped site as a new digital town square that is a less poisonous version of Twitter.
The goal is to create a public square for communities on Instagram that never really embraced Twitter and for communities on Twitter (and other platforms) that are interested in a less angry place for conversations,” Mosseri stated on Friday.
According to the web analytics firm SimilarWeb, Twitter traffic dropped 5% from the same period last week and 11% from the same period a year prior in the first two full days that Threads was widely available, which were Thursday and Friday of last week.
However, it was also noted that despite the lack of Threads, total Twitter traffic has decreased.
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