- Meta's newest app is here: Threads.
- Mark Zuckerberg bills Threads as a space for kindness — but he's not above using it to ding Elon Musk.
So, welcome to Threads, Mark Zuckerberg's new online Disneyland that officially opened for business on Wednesday, where everyone gets along happily and kindness is the order of the day.
At least that's the idea.
As the Meta chief put it on the new Threads app, the vision is "to create an open and friendly public space for conversation" for 1 billion-plus people. A post from the official Threads account doubled down on the ambition to "foster a positive and creative space" for users to express themselves.
A quick refresher: Threads is Meta's most direct shot at Twitter yet. It's a standalone app that enables public, text-based updates and conversations from users, and is tied to your Instagram identity. Some 10 million people signed up for Threads within seven hours of its public launch early Thursday.
—Paul Graham (@paulg) July 6, 2023
All the kindness on Threads is laced with a particularly Zuckerbergish flavor of schadenfreude, since the new app launches as Twitter crashes more spectacularly than any SpaceX rocket.
As my colleague Kevin Tan pointed out, Zuckerberg, compulsively competitive, hasn't been able to stop himself from sassing Twitter's owner and prime architect of its downfall, Elon Musk.
Responding to a post on Threads' launch from a user named metamoskov, which showed an image of Zuckerberg standing topless in a victorious pose in the middle of a ring, Zuckerberg replied with crying with laughter emojis while declaring "let's go!"
The Meta chief also took a break from his 11-year Twitter hiatus to tweet a picture of the Spiderman meme in which two identical Spidermen point at each other.
—Mark Zuckerberg (@finkd) July 6, 2023
It's a highly calculated move to release a Twitter clone in a week of Twitter chaos.
In the last week, Twitter temporarily and chaotically restricted the number of tweets users can see, prevented users from seeing tweets unless they're logged in, and limited the much-loved service TweetDeck to paying Twitter Blue subscribers.
Several of the posts that scattered Threads in its opening hours came from disgruntled Twitter users who swore to never look back, or poked fun at the thought of Musk panicking about people leaving.
Threads can only be so friendly then if its growth, for now, comes from the conflagration at Twitter. It's also currently reliant on new app energy.
Judging by social media's track record, it's only a matter of time before this digital Disneyland shows its true colors.