In less than 48 hours, Meta’s Twitter rival Threads has surpassed 70 million sign-ups, upended the social media landscape and appears to have rattled Twitter enough that it is now threatening legal action against Meta.
But even as users signed up for Threads in droves, with some clearly eager to flee the chaos of Elon Musk’s Twitter, the sudden success of Meta’s app could raise a new set of concerns.
Meta has long been criticized for its market dominance, and for allegedly trying to choke off competition by copying and killing rival applications. Now, some competition experts and even some Threads users worry that if the new app’s traction continues, it may simply lead to the accumulation of even more power and dominance for Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The prospect of total monopoly by Meta, yikes,” wrote one user. “It’s a real problem for society when a few dozen people and companies own every single thing so that no alternative paradigms can exist that they don’t co-opt from the cradle,” replied another.
Twitter had always been much smaller than Meta’s platforms, but it had an outsized influence in tech, media and politics. As Twitter faltered under Musk, though, a cottage industry emerged of smaller apps trying to capture some of its magic. Now more than any of them, Meta seems best positioned to claim the crown.
Threads’ blockbuster launch this week highlights the uncomfortable reality of the modern digital economy: To potentially beat some of the biggest players in the industry, you might have to be a giant yourself.
The power of Instagram
The overnight success of Threads is a testament both to the dissatisfaction with Musk’s ownership of Twitter and to the unique power and reach of one of Meta’s most important properties: Instagram.
Instagram has more than two billion users, far more than the 238 million users Twitter reported having in the months before Musk took over. When new users sign up for Threads, which they do using an Instagram account, the app prompts them to follow all of their existing Instagram contacts with a single tap. It’s optional, but is easy to accept, and it takes a conscious decision to decline.
By promoting Threads through Instagram, and by sharing Instagram user data with Threads to let people instantly recreate their social networks, Meta has significantly greased the onboarding process. That frictionless experience has allowed Threads to leapfrog what’s known in the industry as the “cold start” problem, in which a new platform struggles to gain new users because there are no other users there to attract them.
Thanks to the Instagram integration, “that biggest problem, the chicken-egg problem, has been solved from the jump,” Reddit co-founder and venture investor Alexis Ohanian said in a video Thursday (posted, naturally, on Threads).
That Threads appeared to clear that hurdle easily, Ohanian said, makes him “bullish” on the new app.
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In less than 48 hours, Meta’s Twitter rival Threads has 
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