The Twitter competitor from Meta, Instagram Threads, is expected to launch on July 6th, according to the App Store listing for the app showing a version ready for Apple’s iPhone. This follows an Android listing for Threads, an Instagram app, that briefly showed up on Google Play on Saturday with similar screenshots and some initial details. Another listing I saw that’s still live on Google Play doesn’t have a release date, so this App Store page may give us the official date for Threads to launch.
Here is the official — and brief — description of the app, from the App Store:
Say more with Threads — Instagram’s text-based conversation app
Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow. Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things — or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world.
The listing also has the same screenshots from the Google Play listing, showing how you can log in with your Instagram handle, find the accounts you follow on Instagram on the new app, and post in an interface similar to Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or any of the other text-focused social apps.
My colleague Alex Heath reported on a companywide meeting last month where Meta executives shared that Instagram Threads will integrate with the decentralized social media protocol used by Mastodon, called ActivityPub. That’s also the meeting where an exec said, “We’ve been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run,” sparking talk of a cage match between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
Still, just because the app is available to download on July 6th doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to jump in and post. I wouldn’t be surprised if Meta does a slow rollout of some kind for the app, so you might want to be prepared to wait to actually be able to find your new non-Twitter home.
But I can understand if you’re actively seeking a new place to post. Twitter has blocked unregistered users from being able to see tweets and implemented rate limits for those who are logged in that could block you after reading hundreds or thousands of posts in a day.
The company is also suddenly rolling out major changes to TweetDeck, a tool used by many journalists and social media professionals, shortly after the app began to break, supposedly under the strain of scrapers trawling for data to feed AI models. And in about a month, TweetDeck is scheduled to become a paid feature. Many Twitter users tried to turn to Bluesky over the holiday weekend, but that service halted new user signups for more than a day to fix issues it ran into because of the waves of people flooding the app. The CEO of Mastodon says he is feeling good, though.
