Meta's Threads Crosses 10M Signups in 7 hours, ChatGPT had 1+M Users in 7 days

Meta launched its Twitter alternative ‘Threads’ today, and the app broke all previous records. The new offering garnered a humongous 10 million sign ups in just the initial 7 hours, while OpenAIs ChatGPT had 1+ million users in its first 7 days. This must be a little ‘pat on the back moment’ for Zuck, and company, who has been competing with OpenAI and others.

It's super easy to sign up to threads, you just need to download the new app and can access it through your existing Instagram account. While ChatGPT’s humongous popularity could be because it was one of its kind large language model which people could access for free—Threads owes its success to Instagram’s existing user base.

And now that the buzz around the Musk vs Zuckerberg cage match has subsided—the rivalry has moved on to a new frontier. Hours after launching Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to twitter for the first time in over a decade to address the elephant in the room. Poking fun at the situation, Zuckerberg posted the iconic Spider Man facing off meme in reference to the Threads announcement.

Musk did not hold off either, he then flicked a quick jab(imaginary of course, because the match was never going to happen) in Zuck’s direction as he implied that the app is nothing but a copy-paste, while reacting to a tweet.

Twitter has been reeling from some extreme measures taken by Elon Musk—first to monetise the platform, then to save all the data on the platform from being scraped off to build LLMs by limiting the number of posts visible to unpaid accounts on Twitter to 600. However, Zuck seems to have struck gold. Ex Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s Twitter alternative Bluesky also apparently saw a record high traffic thanks to Musk’s unpopular opinion. Mastodon built on the ActivityPub protocol also gained from it.

While, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that Meta’s Threads won't support ActivityPub on launch, in the future it might be built on the protocol allowing one to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, such as Mastodon. 

“Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, such as Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, such as @[email protected],” Mosseri said—-noting that the team couldn't complete work on time to support fediverse at launch. 

However, there’s a catch, you can only deactivate your threads profile once you've signed up. And to permanently delete your profile and associated data you will need to delete your Instagram account.