Meta’s Rival Twitter Threads Will Be Launching on July 6th, but Can the Crypto Community Be Persuaded to Change Their Minds?
Meta will start threads on July 6th, just days after Twitter’s “rate limit” fiasco, which temporarily capped the number of posts users can see per day.
According to a meta countdown website, the platform, which has ties to Instagram’s photo and video sharing network, will be released on Thursday. Threads can be pre-ordered from Apple’s App Store. The release date is expected to be July 6th.
The app has received little attention, at least in the crypto-addicted Twitter community.
Concerns were raised about data mining and privacy, and a lack of confidence that the standalone application would survive.
Tiffany Fong is a crypto Twitter influencer with 66,600 subscribers. She told AskFX that she had never heard of threads before. “I don’t know what the meta alternative is. I have an active Instagram account that has 10,400 followers.”
In a Twitter poll by crypto influencer Kyle Chasse — a self-proclaimed “bitcoin and crypto OG” — over 87% (125) of respondents have theirs Expressed support for “Team Twitter” over “Team Meta”.
🚨 META IS ABOUT TO RELEASE 'THREADS' ON JULY 7th
Which team are you on?
— Kyle Chassé (@kyle_chasse) July 4, 2023
Jack Dorsey, former Twitter CEO, highlighted Threads’ privacy policy. It states that Threads developer Instagram would have access to a variety of user data including financial information and identifiers.
All your Threads are belong to us https://t.co/FfrIcUng5O pic.twitter.com/V7xbMOfINt
— jack (@jack) July 4, 2023
Researchers who replied to Dorsey’s post claim the Twitter collects data similar to threads and has the same permissions.
Some have raised concerns about the longevity of the app. Meta’s previous standalone apps have either been discontinued or the functionality has been integrated into other products.
Nick St. Pierre is a Twitter user who posts about developments in the field of artificial intelligence. He said: “Meta doesn’t want you to know that they closed threads in December 2021 after closing another standalone application called Direct.”
“They have released separate apps in the past to attract attention, then closed it and then integrated the functionality into a larger app.” [Instagram] limited the number of tweets a user can view per day.
Threads allows users to import their Instagram followers and followers list so they don’t have to start from scratch. A company spokesman told reporters earlier this year that the Threads standalone app will support ActivityPub – the decentralized social networking protocol behind Twitter competitor Mastodon.
Mastodon, the decentralized Twitter competitor, has also seen a spike in activity over the past few months as more users have joined since Twitter introduced its restrictions.
