The new rival, Threads, is threatening to be sued by the micro- network for trade secrets

Twitter threatens to sue Meta for destroying the trustworthiness of its rival app Threads, a social sharing app that combines Twitter and Twitter

The app that began generating buzz as Meta’s competitor, Threads, started was listed in the App Store. Like all iOS apps, the listing included details about the user data the app is designed to collect and track. Observers noticed that this brand-new app listed 14 different categories of data that might be collected and linked to your identity.

Twitter has seen a host of challenges from similar microblogging platforms since Musk first acquired the platform for $44 billion last year. The most recent one to grow was Threads, with more than 70 million users being signed up by Friday morning.

Meta says that Threads will support ActivityPub, but it doesn’t inspire confidence. The company has spent years trying to improve the quality of end-to-end encryption on Messenger. Meta wanted the app to support ActivityPub from the start and incorporating decentralization into Threads was a core part of that. In its privacypolicy for Threads, Meta has sketched out the plan.

“The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. The pressure on platforms to provide better, less exploitative services can be put on such platforms by this.

The user interface of the app is very similar to Twitter and has buttons to reply, repost or quote a thread. Users lamented the lack of some classic features on the social networking site.

Twitter has threatened to take legal action against Threads, a new rival app from Meta that has gained tens of millions of users since its release on Wednesday.

The letter, which was first reported by Semafor , accuses Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees with the intention of creating a “copycat” platform.

“If Meta does not immediately stop using any of the highly confidential information that it has been given, it will be held criminally responsible for violating the intellectual property rights of the company,” Spiro wrote. There is a right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice.

On Wednesday, Threads’ launch day, Mark Zuckerberg posted about his desire to usurp Elon Musk’s broken social network: “I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it,” he wrote. Hopefully we will.

Meta will have to beat a throng of other would-be Twitter killers, including Bluesky, Mastodon, Post News, Spoutible, Cohost, Hive Social, T2 Social, and Spill, in addition to conversation platforms aimed at right-wing users, like Truth Social, Gettr, and Gab, as well as established social networks now courting disenchanted Twitter users, like Tumblr and Substack.

Early online reviews are not very positive. Noah Kulwin, writer, said it was funny that Zuck rolled out a social media killer and people had less than 24 hours to decide. There isn’t sure whether the early Adopters on Threads will stick around. Reels could be a copy of Tiktok and be used by dorks to get their hands on the original.

What can we learn from cloned Twitter? The hope that Twitter can be a hub for public discourse and a fun place to poke at each other

The people of the internet have to draw a line in the sand. We should dump concrete into that line so it doesn’t get eroded by waves.

No one can stop tech companies from launching new platforms. But people can refuse to join. It’s obnoxious enough to toggle between microblogging apps, tweeting and skeeting and tooting the same words to slightly different audiences. It’s too much to thread the mix. I’ve already seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, copying and pasting to skeet a tweet. It is not a way to live.

It’s unlikely that we can replicate the kind of social media cultivated by it. It’ll be flat-out impossible if these clones keep coming, fracturing the global conversation Twitter presented at its best into dozens of inferior smaller channels, none able to achieve the network effect necessary to function as a true hub for public discourse—or even just a fun place to shitpost. None of the current substitutes is perfect, but diluting the pool further will only weaken our existing options. I’d like to see Twitter restored to its pre-Musk functionality—but if that’s not going to happen, I’d rather pick one of the many wannabe water coolers I’ve already downloaded instead of cycling through imitator after imitator.