Meta Threads is a micro-blogging platform focused on short text posts, limited to 500 characters, and also allows users to add photos or videos to their posts. Threads was created by Meta, which already runs Facebook and Instagram, and at the moment you need an Instagram account in order to create a Threads account.
From the perspective of building a successful new platform, being a part of Meta is a clear advantage. Apart from the obvious benefit of having access to a lot of people with deep expertise in building and running large-scale social platforms, Meta was able to encourage a large number of existing Instagram users to set up Threads accounts very quickly.
Social platforms are reliant on the “network effect” which means the more users they have, the more useful they are. A brand new social network with few users isn’t much fun, and it’s usually a struggle to build up a large enough user base for that platform to reach the point where it becomes useful, so many of the early users abandon it long before it reaches that point.
Threads is reported to have achieved 30 million users within its first day, and industry commentators claim that it exceeded 70 million by the end of the second day, although how many of them will become active regular users remains to be seen.