What's Threads, the Meta app copying X

Formerly known as Twitter has been through a lot, too much, in the past few months. Since it was acquired by Elon Musk in October 2022, its market value has dropped to 15 billion - Musk spent 44 to buy it - Mastodon tried to replace it, the blue checkmark has become a paid feature, the iconic bird has transformed, albeit briefly, into a Shiba Inu, and even the app's name has changed. More recently, Musk had to defend himself against X for alleged antisemitic comments. As if that wasn't enough, Mark Zuckerberg's group, Meta, has launched Threads, an app "text-based," as explained by the App Store, which recently appeared, «where communities come together to discuss everything from topics that interest you today to those that will be trending tomorrow.» Launched in America and England in July but available for download in Italy starting from yesterday, it is essentially a Twitter 2.0.

Born in 2019 to compete with Snapchat, later abandoned and now completely revolutionized, Threads is entirely dedicated to text rather than images. Among the features that make the resemblance between this new app and X obvious are the ability to repost and the ability to add comments with entire photo galleries, and a detail that seems to be a jab: the name of Meta's new app, Threads, is the term used on X to describe a series of connected tweets, one of the most used words in the vocabulary of Musk's social media creators. In July, in response to Meta's launch announcement, Musk had started making X inaccessible to those without an account (previously, anyone could read tweets) and imposed a new rule that prevented social media users without a paid subscription from seeing more than 600 posts per day, a limit that was later increased to 1000.

In a meeting with The Verge, Meta's Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, stated: «We have received requests from creators and public figures interested in having a platform run smoothly,» a provocation that was not well received by Musk, who tweeted, «I’m up for a cage match if he is lol,» referring to the Facebook founder. Rumors were circulating about an epic encounter at the Colosseum, but fortunately, they were wrong; Musk settled for a lawsuit. Despite many Instagram users downloading Threads, it is still unclear whether the new platform will become a new Meta - pun intended - favorite. Currently, the app has 141 million users, a figure that, compared to over two billion on Instagram, is just hopeful.