Meta says 70 million people have now signed up for Threads and there have been over 90 million posts. It took Twitter four years to build that audience. Â
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Elon is now threatening to sue Meta, alleging Meta has copied Twitter, saying "competition is fine, cheating is not". But he's in for a hard time because copyright law doesn't protect ideas, and Meta has a patent for its newsfeed. If anything, it means Meta could counter sue Twitter - which is exactly why these companies patent things like this even if they never really expect to enforce them.Â
Jane Manchun Wong - who is famous in tech circles for uncovering unreleased features in Twitter (and other apps) as they're being developed - is now working for Meta on Threads.Â
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Meta is really pushing the safety and community aspect of this appÂ
Meta says they want it to be a "friendly" place for conversation but I still don't see how they plan to make that happen. Instagram's boss says they're not going to do anything to encourage politics and “hard news" - but that won't stop people publishing their thoughts about it? Yes, Meta has more moderation policies, more tech to enforce them, more people to manually review content - but that doesn't inherently make it a safer place. Is Twitter a less safe place than Facebook today?Â
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What's next?Â
Instagram is working on a feed just for people you follow and a chronological feed - which is going to make it a LOT more usable. Right now the feed seems to display random content without rhyme or reason - I certainly can't pickup a theme to what I'm getting.Â
Hashtags, trending topics and more are also in the works.Â
They'll also add proper fediverse / activity pub support - which will could open the door to account portability, and even interoperability with other Twitter-like services.Â
Hopefully a proper web version is coming soon too. At the moment you can only find someone's profile if you know their username - eg. https://www.threads.net/@paulstenhouseÂ
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