Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has today announced that Instagram’s text social media app Threads is coming to Europe.
In an Instagram post, Zuckerberg stated “Today we’re opening Threads to more countries in Europe. Welcome everyone.”
“Today, Mark Zuckerberg announced that we are expanding Threads to countries across Europe,” Meta stated. “We’re excited to give more people the opportunity to follow and join the conversations they care about. Since launching Threads in July, we’ve made significant improvements to the app, including a web experience, a Following Feed, the ability to edit a post, search with keywords, tag topics, and more.
Users in the EU can create a Threads profile linked to their Instagram account, or view content on Threads without a profile. Those users will also be able to search for accounts and share content, as well as report content they don’t like, they just won’t be able to post or interact with other content.
Threads
Threads has proven pretty popular since its launch, smashing 100 million users in just five days following its launch in July. Recently Apple revealed the most popular iPhone games and apps of 2023, with Threads the fourth most popular free iPhone app of the year ahead of TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and WhatsApp. Naturally, this position reflects a significant number of downloads this year because the app is new, but it’s an impressive feat nonetheless.
Meta hasn’t specified which European countries the expansion today entails, but refers to “people in the EU” in its release, suggesting it could be 27 EU member states including France, Spain, Italy, and more.
An emerging alternative to the increasingly volatile X run by Elon Musk, Threads is a text-based social media platform that lets users write posts of up to 500 characters, including links, photos, and videos of up to five minutes. This week Threads also announced it was testing making posts from Threads accounts visible on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol.