Twitter Opponents “Threads” Passes 10mn Users Within Hours Of Commencement

More than 10 million people have signed up for Threads, Meta’s opponent to Twitter, within the first few hours of its launch, the Facebook parent’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday.

Threads are the biggest challenger yet to Elon Musk-owned Twitter, which has seen a series of potential competitors emerge but not yet replace one of the social media’s most iconic companies, despite its epic struggles.

The app went live on Apple and Android app stores in 100 countries at 2300 GMT on Wednesday and will run with no ads for now.

“10 million sign-ups in seven hours,” Zuckerberg wrote on his official Threads account Thursday.

Accounts were already active for celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, and Hugh Jackman, as well as media outlets including The Washington Post and The Economist.

Zuckerberg spent the first few hours of the platform’s launch replying to new users.

“One thing that’s up is the number of world winner MMA fighters on Threads, particularly now that you’re here!” he wrote in a reply to American MMA fighter Jon Jones.

“Round one of this thing is getting off to a good start,” he said in another.

Zuckerberg also offered a shot across the bow at Musk — the pair are known to be bitter opponents and have even offered to meet each other in a fighting cage to wrestle it out.

In his first tweet in over a decade, Zuckerberg posted a Spiderman pointing at Spiderman meme in a possible source of the similarity between the two platforms.

Back on Threads, he wrote: “It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the alternative to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully, we will.”

Twitter has said it has more than 200 million day-to-day users.

Edited by Damilola Adeleke