Twitter rivals flex their muscles as Musk restricts access

Since January, Threads has been under development at Meta under the name “Project 92”. Meta has added a launch date teaser to the Instagram app…reports Asian Lite News

The abrupt changes at Twitter under Elon Musk, that has left millions of users annoyed, has resulted in a surge in several competitor apps to the so-called ‘public digital square’ and leading the pack in Meta’s Threads that is set to be launched this week.

As Twitter writes its own nemesis as it finally heads towards a fully paid service, Musk rivals have sensed the deep grudge among Twitter users.

Before Twitter owner Musk and Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg enter a full-on cage fight (both are apparently preparing for the Jiu Jitsu showdown), Instagram Threads is expected to launch on Thursday, according to an App Store listing for the application.

“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,” according to Meta.

With the new Twitter-like app, users will be able to follow and connect directly with their favourite creators and others. Last week, Threads briefly appeared on the Google Play Store.

Since January, Threads has been under development at Meta under the name “Project 92”. Meta has added a launch date teaser to the Instagram app.

Typing “threads” into the search box (or a number of other keywords) causes a ticket icon to appear on the search bar. Another Twitter competitor Mastodon is witnessing a steep rise in new members.

According to its CEO Eugen Rochko, the number of active users across the decentralised social media platform went up by 2,94,000 over the weekend, as Twitter faced refresh rate limit and post viewing restrictions, especially for non-paid users. Mastodon recently crossed more than 10 million registered accounts.

Sensing a big opportunity, Twitter rival Bluesky, backed by none other than Jack Dorsey who still feels that running Twitter is “hard”, has reopened the sign-ups that the company disabled a few days back.

“We just enabled account sign-ups again, so any outstanding invite codes can now be used to create an account,” the company said in a screenshot shared by The Verge.

In an update, the platform said: “We are still working to accommodate the large influx of users and increase in traffic.”

Meanwhile, popular messaging platform Telegram posted on Twitter: “Don’t worry, you can read as many Telegram posts as you want”.

Facing a myriad of issues, Musk has announced that the recent Twitter changes for users are temporary to “address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation”. However, the micro-blogging platform has now launched a new and improved version of the social media dashboard application for management ‘TweetDeck’ globally, saying that after 30 days, only verified users will be able to access the new app.

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