Mark Zuckerberg has taken to Threads to announce that the platform will now be available to users across the European Union. This follows a delay from its July 2023 launch due to the introduction of the Digital Markets Act across its member states.
The launch comes alongside new features for the site, which continues to develop, including the ability to browse Threads without requiring a profile. Any content interaction will still require an account (which still remains linked to Instagram), however Threads accounts can be deleted independently of Instagram now, unlike at launch.
The site itself is seeing increasing activity and growth in recent months ever since the recent controversy around Elon Musk's X, with many companies withdrawing their advertising from the site, as well as ceasing posting altogether.
Meanwhile, Threads has also begun testing its promised fediverse integration, with posts and accounts being made visible on services such as Mastodon that use the ActivityPub protocol. This was always a planned feature for Threads which is just now starting to come to fruition.
At the moment only a select few user accounts from Threads are visible on Mastodon, and they show as having the @threads.net instance on accounts. Posts are not yet displaying as well as other relevant profile information, however it shows that the integration is on its way as seen below. The visibility of Threads profiles and information will also completely depend on the instance that your account is set to, as some Mastodon instances have suspended the Threads instance because it was owned and managed by Meta.
With Threads continuing to develop, and X making u-turns on decisions that it makes since Elon Musk's takeover, the social media landscape is now considerably different to what it was 12 months ago. Whether people will continue to seek out a Twitter replacement, or will be happy without, remains to be seen.
