For now, it’s not clear it has one. The app amassed a massive initial user base, including well-known celebrities and brands, precisely because it is an expansion of Instagram. To sign up for Threads, you need an Instagram account, and it’s easy to toggle back and forth between the two. Instagram has well over a billion users (by some estimates closer to 2 billion), and the app has been luring users to Threads with notifications to join their friends there.

The question is, what to do once you’re on? So far, Threads’ user base is similar to that of Instagram, and prominent accounts are predictable — celebrities, politicians, news organisations, influencers and the like. It’s harder to find original posts from regular people, unless your Instagram connections happen to be a chatty — or thready — bunch.

If you sign up without connecting a well-used Instagram account, by creating one just so you can join Threads, the experience can feel impersonal and sterile as the app steers you to follow big, popular accounts that everyone else follows, too.

While many popular internet celebrities rushed to sign up for Threads and quickly amassed large followings, it’s not clear how many of them are returning regularly. MrBeast, a popular YouTuber whose actual name is Jimmy Donaldson, has 5 million followers on the app. But he has not posted in two weeks — though he has sent several TikToks, tweets (or posts on the site now called X) and a 18-minute video on YouTube, where he has 175 million subscribers.

Zuckerberg, in a recent conference call, said he’s “optimistic” about Threads but acknowledged there’s a “lot of work to do” to make it reach its full potential.

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“It has been sort of this weird anomalous thing in the tech industry that there hasn’t been an app for public discussions like this that has reached 1 billion people,” he said. “When I look at all the different social experiences, it just seems like there should be one like this.”

Maybe so, but it’s not clear it’ll be Threads. As Zuckerberg acknowledged during the same call, Meta has tried “a bunch of standalone experiences over time” but in general, it hasn’t had much luck.

There’s Facebook, sure. But the company bought both Instagram and WhatsApp, its two other successful apps. The biggest one may be Messenger — but even that started as a service inside Facebook before it was spun out as a separate app.

“(It’s) awesome that we get a chance to work on this, and I’m really optimistic about where we are,” Zuckerberg said. “But it’s going to be a long road ahead.“

AP

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