Will Threads become a replacement for Twitter: an overview of the new social network

The release of Threads hit the information space with a real avalanche, which can easily sweep away Twitter – optimists unanimously say this. Pessimists call the new social network an enchanting failure of Meta, arguing that it has absorbed the worst of Twitter and Instagram. In the meantime, users are arguing and proving to each other the opposite, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are actively adding fuel to the fire with sharp punches, preparing for lawsuits and are even going to decide everything “manly” in the octagon.

Behind all this media show, the most important thing is lost – the product itself, the creation of which took years of painstaking work of the best Meta specialists. We decided to fix this and conduct our own technical analysis of Threads, its functionality and main features in order to understand how the platform managed to collect more than 70 million users in 2 day.

It’s no secret that Twitter hasn’t been doing very well lately, and when Elon Musk bought the platform, things got even worse. His endless experiments constantly baffled users and caused one wave of indignation after another. Without hesitation, Meta decided to take advantage of the situation by expanding its influence to this segment of social networks.

In fact, the developers of Threads had a rather simple, but at the same time ingenious task – to repeat the functionality of Twitter, add a few new features to it to avoid litigation, and integrate the new platform into the Meta ecosystem so that it takes its rightful place next to Facebook and Instagram.

As a result, engineers created the Threads mobile app and web version, with somewhat limited functionality. The new social network allows you to share text content, photos, short videos, as well as create thematic threads for discussing posts. Well, of course, there is an opportunity to subscribe to other users, put likes, repost and write comments under the publications you like.

In fact, Threads has become a platform for microblogging and forced Twitter to back down a bit.

There is one important nuance here – Threads is part of the Meta ecosystem. Therefore, the engineers managed to implement the automatic transfer of the user’s subscriber base from Instagram to the Threads profile, which greatly facilitates migration to a new social network.

In short, there are 5 main differences between Threads and Twitter:

• In Threads, the maximum length of posts is almost 2 times longer – 500 characters, compared to 280 in Twitter.
• Threads is treated as part of Instagram, so you can only create an account on it using an existing Instagram profile.
• At the moment, Threads does not allow you to search for posts by hashtags in the search, as it works on Twitter, so browsing news on trending topics can be somewhat difficult.
• If you publish materials in Threads that contradict the rules of the platform, you can get a ban on three social networks at once – in Threads itself, as well as on Instagram and Facebook.
• Reposts from Threads can be made immediately to the feed or stories on Instagram, which makes it easier to maintain an account across multiple networks. In addition, in 1 click you can also upload your publication to Twitter.

Not all decisions of Threads engineers can be called successful, and some of them may even scare away users, for example, a triple ban for posting that does not comply with the rules. But you need to understand that over time, the functionality will change and expand, and it’s not worth drawing premature conclusions yet.

Despite the fact that Meta has not officially disclosed the technological stack that was used in the development, enthusiasts have already managed to make educated guesses about what Threads might have under the hood.

According to the well-known pythonist and creator of the Black formatter Lukasz Lang, the server part of the new social network is built on Python 3.10, or rather, using the internal Meta fork called Cinder. Unlike the base CPython 3.10, it provides developers with JIT compilation, a number of performance optimizations, and a huge number of useful tweaks. By the way, this fork was recently released to the public in order to speed up the development of CPython.

In turn, Reddit users managed to establish that part of the Threads mobile application was implemented using React Native.

According to some reports, the Meta team quite often uses this JS framework to develop small functions, as an addition to the main native technologies.

The version of Threads for the Android operating system is almost entirely written in the Jetpack Compose framework – this information was published by one of the current Meta developers, so you can trust his words. This suggests that the iOS version was also created in the native Swift language, using tools such as SwiftUI, Xcode, AppCode, iOS SDK.

As a result, we get a classic stack for native development of a mobile version of a social network, using a customized Python 3.10 for the backend. As for the web version of Threads, it probably uses the same backend as the mobile apps, and its front could well be implemented using React Native.

Threads is currently ad-free and provides features for free, so the app’s monetization model is not yet known. But if you look at existing Meta projects, you can assume that microblogging will soon begin offering paid targeted advertising and other tools for promoting a business online.

However, this is not the only way. It is possible that Threads will take the subscription format as a basis and start selling premium accounts similar to Youtube Premium.

Imagine that, for a small monthly fee, users can completely get rid of ads and gain access to advanced features, such as an increased character limit in posts. This may well be in demand.

In any case, there is no doubt that Mark Zuckerberg, who built the largest social network, will be able to find an ingenious monetization model for his new project.

Until recently, microblogs were called an obsolete format and predicted their imminent death, but the release of Threads clearly showed that this was not so. At a minimum, if one of the largest IT giants in the world turns a blind eye to the voices of skeptics and launches its own microblog, this already says a lot. Therefore, it definitely makes sense to invest in a similar platform.

In turn, we are ready to provide a strong and experienced team that can take over the technical implementation of such a project, with all the innovative features and any non-standard ideas.