Product attributes
Threads is an application built by Meta and attached to Meta's Instagram. The app is a text-sharing or micro-blogging app in which users can offer real-time updates or engage in public conversations. Posts on Threads can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photos, and videos up to five minutes in length. Further, a Threads post can be shared to a user's Instagram story, and a post can be shared as a link on any other platform of the user's choice. Threads is available as a mobile application for iOS and Android and in a web-user experience.
Meta's founding vision for Threads is to create a positive and creative space for users to express their ideas—a space where users can follow and connect with friends and follow creators with shared interests. Instagram users can use Threads with their existing usernames and connect with their existing Instagram followers. Users on Threads have to be over sixteen (or eighteen by country) to have a public profile, and Threads uses similar safety features as Instagram, including enforcing Instagram's Community Guidelines, allowing users to add hidden words to filter replies with those words, and allowing users to unfollow, block, restrict, or report a profile on Threads.
On the first few days after its launch, early users signed up to experience the application—around 10 million in the first seven hours, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg—where they discovered they required an Instagram account for onboarding to Threads. In the case where a user decided they did not enjoy the application and wanted to delete their threads account, they discovered they also had to delete their Instagram account. According to Meta, the explanation is that the Threads profile and account are a part of the Instagram account.
User feedback on the first day over this policy decision led to clarification that a user could deactivate their Threads account to hide their profile or content, could set their profile to private, or could delete all individual Threads posts in order to effectively delete a Threads account, without deleting the account itself as the Threads and Instagram accounts remain linked.
Threads is designed to be compatible with an open and interoperable social network, intended to be compatible not only with Instagram but other social media sites. This compatibility is to be achieved through ActivityPub, an open social network protocol established by W3C, which would make Threads compatible and interoperable with other applications that support the ActivityPub protocol, such as Mastodon or WordPress.
Meta has said the future for Threads and ActivityPub is to allow users to stop using Threads and transfer their content to another service or allow users to interact with people on Threads without having a Threads account.