Twitter rivals pile up with Meta's launch of Threads

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Now Facebook owner Meta is jumping into the ring, launching its own contender to dethrone Twitter as the go-to website for the media, officials and celebrities. Here is a breakdown of Twitter's wannabe alternatives. — Zuckerberg's Threads - Described as Instagram's «text-based conversation app,» Meta's Threads will certainly spice up the rivalry between Twitter's Musk and Meta supremo Mark Zuckerberg.

Threads looks a lot like a pared-back version of Twitter, with users able to like, comment on and share posts as well as use their same profile names as on Instagram. Unlike Twitter, there are no hashtags.

A plan to make Threads interoperable with other Twitter rivals such as Mastodon is on hold for now, but not abandoned. — Bluesky, Dorsey's Twitter clone - Bluesky was created by Twitter's co-founder Jack Dorsey and is very popular in Silicon Valley, leaving those in the know scrambling to secure an invite to join the app that is still at the testing phase. The upstart told CNBC it experienced record-high traffic Saturday after Musk said Twitter would temporarily limit the number of posts users can read per day.

Bluesky looks and feels like Twitter as its backers want users from the Musk-owned site to feel at home. Bluesky was actually created as a Twitter side project in 2019 as a way to think about a decentralized version of the platform where users — and not the company — are more in control of personal data and content moderation.