Twitter rivals: Meta reboots Insta’s defunct text-based Threads app

Instagram and Facebook parent Meta has announced that it is a launching a “new” text-based platform to rival Twitter set to go live, according to IOS App Store data, on July 6.

Linked to Instagram, a preview of the “text-based conversation” app says Threads will be a place “where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow”.

While the app and its features may be new, it was also the name of a 2019 app that Instagram originally launched to compete with its youth-skewed rival SnapChat.

The 2019 companion app was launched after Meta shut down another standalone messaging app, but it failed to rank higher than 215 on the US App Store, according to VC start up bible TechCrunch.

User reviews published at the time complained about its usability, layout, missing features and glitches.

Meta however, appears confident that the reimagined version of this app will be a serious contender in the text based microblogging space – stealing market share away from Twitter, which it appears to resemble this time more than Snapchat.

“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,” the promotional text says.

Screenshots suggest people will be able to use their Instagram handles to log in to Threads and follow their existing contacts – although users of the visually-led Instagram and text led-Twitter are by no means mutually exclusive.

While the Instagram-related app is less likely to steal away political influencers from Twitter, it may well attract those with more celebrity and lifestyle-based accounts.

Meta’s timing appears impeccably calculated in a week that has seen Twitter impose reading limits and experience outages, which it has attributed to a flurry of data scrapping large language model trainers.

Meanwhile Twitter rival Bluesky – the decentralised invite-only messaging app currently in beta conceived by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey- has had to pause new sign ups, such has been the demand after Musk imposed daily reading limits on tweets.

Comparison service CasinoAlpha meanwhile, has reported that ‘delete Twitter’ searches have risen by 983% in the UK after users were hit with tweet view limits.