What is Threads? Twitter's competitor, which is available in more than 100 countries

Weather of Arabia - "Meta" issued a new application called "Threads", which is a text-based social networking platform that may compete with "Twitter", so that the application becomes available to users in more than 100 countries.

The app, which was released on Wednesday evening, a day before its scheduled launch, allows users to register directly from their Instagram accounts. Thus when it is launched worldwide, more than 2 billion monthly active users can open their accounts directly on Threads.

"The application saw 2 million subscribers in the first two hours," Meta's CEO wrote on the new platform, on Wednesday evening. To add later that the number rose to 10 million subscribers in 7 hours.

The application allows the subscriber to write a post limited to 500 characters, with the ability to add photos and videos.

Viewers can interact by liking, commenting, and reposting, including quoting a clip from the post. The post can also be shared via Instagram Stories.

While most of the features are similar to those of the Twitter platform, its design is similar to Instagram, especially with regard to buttons such as heart, comment and share.

Once logged in, new users with Instagram accounts are told that their accounts should keep the same usernames, but that they can create a different bio and link to their profiles.

And if a person is “dependent” on “Instagram”, he will also be “dependent” on the new application. Users can then choose to group auto-follow accounts they already follow on Instagram.

Accounts that users have already blocked on Instagram will also be automatically banned. Those who wish to limit interactions can choose whether to allow replies by everyone, accounts they follow or mention in their posts.

Instagram's guidelines and rules will be enforced on Threads, and users can report violations to each other.

According to Apple's App Store, Threads is the "Instagram-based conversational app" where users can "say more."

Threads is a place where communities come together to discuss everything from everyday topics to tomorrow's topics.

Whatever your interest, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others like you or build a loyal following of yourself to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world.

In terms of compatibility, Threads is available on iPhone and iPod Touch devices running iOS 14 or later. It will not be available for iPad devices, as it is not surprising because Instagram is also not available on Apple tablets.

According to details on the App Store, the data that “may be collected and linked to your identity” by Threads includes financial and sensitive information. This is more than what the Twitter app uses.

This may be a concern for users, with regard to data, especially after Meta was involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal and fined a record $1.3 billion last May for violating EU privacy laws.

Decentralized platform

Being a decentralized platform means that it has an open source algorithm that allows the public to check and audit its proprietary software, or even use it in other applications. Experts expect this transparency to help build user trust.

Such a move would allow Meta to tap into its user base. As of January, Instagram alone had about 2 billion users while its sister platforms Facebook and WhatsApp had 2.96 billion and 2 billion, respectively, according to the latest data from Statista.

By comparison, Twitter has only about 556 million users. It is still not clear if Threads will be linked to other Meta platforms.

Use of the Arabic language

The app currently includes 31 languages: Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

This means that the application will be launched, at the very least, in these languages mentioned above.

Meta is expected to support more languages. It took seven years before Instagram supported the Arabic language in 2017, while rival video app TikTok took just seven months before launching the Arabic language service.

Threads download link

Threads can be downloaded through the following:

• Download Threads for Android.
• Download Threads for iPhone.

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