Ever since Twitter was acquired by Tesla CEO Elon Musk in October of last year, several Twitter clones have been introduced to rival the social website. Unfortunately, none of the alternatives has so far succeeded but maybe Instagram’s Threads will.
The Twitter-like app which is linked to Instagram will be available for download on July 6th, as per the App Store listing for the app which is showing a version ready for Apple’s iPhone. In the app description in the App Store, Threads is described as a platform where communities can come together to discuss topics they care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow.
Say more with Threads — Instagram’s text-based conversation app
Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow. Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things — or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world.
According to reports from June’s companywide meeting, Meta executives disclosed that Instagram Threads will integrate with ActivityPub, the decentralized social media protocol used by Mastodon.
“We’ve been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run, that they believe that they can trust and rely upon for distribution,” Meta chief product officer Chris Cox said.
This looks like the best timing for the app to go live following Twitter’s chaotic weekend which saw users getting a message saying “Rate limit exceeded” causing confusion on the platform before Musk announced that his social network was now temporarily limiting the number of tweets users can read each day, a move that has sparked backlash. “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits.” Musk said in a tweet.
Verified accounts “are limited to reading 6000 posts/day,” while unverified accounts were limited to 600 per day, New and unverified counts will have an even lower limit of 300, he added before later tweeting, “Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified.”
Less than an hour later, the billionaire sent a subsequent tweet increasing limits to 10,000 for verified, 1,000 for unverified, and 500 for new unverified users.
Since Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of Twitter for $44 billion, the platform has made a series of changes to the social site forcing users to seek refuge elsewhere. One change includes the revamping of Twitter Blue, the company’s paid verification service which costs $8 (approx. UGX30,000) through the web or $11 (approx. UGX41,000) in-app. Organizations seeking verification pay a monthly fee of $1,000 (approx. UGX3.7 million) and $50 for each additional affiliate sub-account.
