As Twitter faces mounting backlash over its latest policy changes, alternative apps like Blue Sky and Mastodon are standing by to welcome disgruntled users of the Elon Musk-owned blogging platform. Yet while these fledgling communities for now remain bit players on the social scene, Meta's new Threads app may finally offer a serious competitor to Twitter, experts say.
Threads, which launched on July 5th, is integrated with Instagram and is backed by Meta's vast technical and financial resources, potent advantages that have helped it quickly acquire tens of millions of users. But whether the platform can retain those users will depend on its ability to roll out features that appeal to Twitter defectors and replicate the app's pre-Musk culture.
Meta launched Threads ahead of schedule on July 5, shortly after Twitter sparked an uproar by placing daily limits on the number of posts its account holders could access. The company's expedited rollout means that Threads debuted without popular features like personalized feeds. That makes it hard to say how the app may evolve, let alone predict its odds of supplanting Twitter.
"There's still a lot we don't know about the app because they rolled out kind of half-finished," said David Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, told CBS MoneyWatch. "Twitter was just looking so incredibly vulnerable that if Meta was going to build a replacement [platform], now was the time to roll it out."
Read the article on CBS' website.