Threads, What It Is, And How The New Meta Social Network Works

Some consider it a simple Instagram add-on, those who don’t understand how it can be helpful in terms of Digital Marketing strategy, and those who, Success or flop? It has become known as the anti-Twitter. This is Threads, a platform that allows you to share short text messages (up to 500 characters), possibly accompanied by images and videos. Within this Social Network, users can interact with other people’s posts, generating discussions on specific topics and delving into vertical issues of interest to them. And how did digital creators receive it?

Threads In India: Main Features Of The Service

Thread is a microblogging platform owned by Meta, which entered India on 14 December, 2023: the announcement came directly from the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, which extended the availability of the new tool simultaneously throughout Europe. Presented in the United States last July, Threads aims to gain an essential position in the social panorama, offering itself as an alternative to more well-known similar services.

The distinctive feature of Threads is its integration with Instagram: users can connect their accounts, allowing automatic cross-posting and sharing of content published on both platforms, thus taking advantage of the complete experience. The alternative is to use Threads without a profile: in this case, you can use the tool in an “informative” way, viewing content, searching for profiles, and sharing content via links, but it is not possible to interact like users with an active profile.

After its debut in the USA, Zuckerberg’s Social Network has gradually implemented new features. In addition to the Web version, options have been introduced, such as editing published posts, adding tags and keywords, and other innovations aimed at making Threads increasingly complete and competitive.

Threads Between Legislation And Creators. What Is The Future?

First of all, since it is fundamentally integrated with Instagram, the application naturally shares a lot of user information between the two platforms. This data-sharing practice has generated problems regarding the DMA, or the Digital Markets Act, a European Union regulation, due to which Meta decided to avoid the launch of Threads in Europe already last July. 

The intent was to avoid exposing the App to possible suspensions or violations of established rules. But, setting aside the rules, what does this strong connection with the Instagram universe imply in terms of the evolution and future of the tool? And how did not only users but also digital creators welcome it?

The Decline In Users

Although the initial hype immediately led to the belief that the birth of this new digital creature is positive and destined for longevity, the data on the US market, where adoption began months ago, is harmful: according to estimates from the American company Sensor Tower, which specializes in market research and social media analytics, has seen a significant drop in the number of daily active users on Threads in the space of a month.

There was a sudden decline compared to the peak of launch numbers (7 July 2023), when as many as 23.5 million daily active users were registered, subsequently decreasing to just 13 million. Furthermore, the average time spent by users on the App on both iOS and Android devices dropped from 19 minutes to just 4 minutes. Why this?

Perhaps the strong connection with Instagram favored an initial “transfer” of users who, however, are deeply accustomed to a different interaction, made up of images and reels, and not to purely textual content, which would have caused the almost immediate defection. Likewise, the creators themselves who want to try their hand at the tool will have to “learn” to use it according to its logic, which – to be precise – is clearly “less Tik-Tok” and more “LinkedIn” in approach.

Differences Between Threads, X, And Mastodon

But what differentiates Threads from other tools like Twitter and Mastodon? They can all be defined as microblogging platforms: something that goes beyond social, i.e., based on the desire to share short texts and ideas around a theme. However, they have some substantial differences.

Threads Vs

Threads focus on more intimate sharing with selected groups of users: this creates a more restricted and private environment for communication, unlike X, a public platform where users can share their thoughts, news, and content with a large audience without particular restrictions, facilitating conversations on topics of common interest with a much broader scope.

Even from the point of view of interaction and the nature of the contents, there are significant differences: Threads focuses mainly on short text messages, possibly accompanied by images or videos, which, however, are not the core, while X offers a broad spectrum of multimedia contents such as GIFs, videos, photos, and external links.

Threads Vs Mastodon

And Mastodon? For those who don’t know it, this is the microblogging tool most loved by “nerds” around: independent, free of advertising – for now at least, with all due respect to marketers -it was created in the EU, and its servers are Finnish. The architecture of the platforms differs considerably: Threads is centralized and connected to Instagram, managed by Meta with all the classic Social logic, while Mastodon is a decentralized instance made up of several independent instances, managed by different administrators and by the users themselves. 

This structure makes Mastodon perfect for those who want to work their search for content, exchange opinions, and create communities more flexibly and autonomously, which can generate some moderation problems but also more freedom.

The Problem Of Junk Content

Despite having been in India for a very short time, the first problems took little time to arrive. In fact, just a few weeks ago, a significant theme linked to junk content has already emerged on Threads: the new social network has been filled with Fake News, fake photos, and hate speech messages. 

One of the reasons for this phenomenon is Rage Farming, a manipulation technique used to create anger and, therefore, user involvement to increase the number of followers and interactions on posts. The result was an exponential increase in low-quality content, which aroused quite a bit of anger among a good part of users, so much so that Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, apologized for the functioning of the algorithm, which recommends precisely that content and stated that they are working to resolve the problem as soon as possible.

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