Weird times that we wait for Facebook’s parent company Meta to save us from the Twitter chaos. During the weekend, Elon Musk announced that it would limit the number of tweets people could see daily to address the “extreme levels of data scraping.”
While unverified users would have a 600 tweets limit, Twitter Blue paid users would have ten times more. Many users posted a “rate limit exceeded” notification on Sunday and Monday, but it wasn’t something BGR staff experienced.
With that, the weekend was full for developers on other social media apps, such as Mastodon, Blue Sky, and the once-popular Koo, as users were trying to find a new place to share their thoughts, and these apps’ servers were suffering from outages and login issues. Interestingly enough, Musk’s claims are similar to what Reddit used to start charging developers for its API.
To BBC, data scientist and ex-Twitter employee Dur Rumman Chowdhury said it’s unclear if AI organizations had been scraping data from Twitter, but financial issues could be the real problem. “Frankly, I think I’m in a majority of people who believe that it’s due to his lack of payment of his bills… and he’s attempting to reduce his costs,” she said.
What makes this chaos interesting is that users are now waiting for Meta to announce its Twitter (copycat) competitor called Threads. During the weekend, reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi noted that the long-tested app was released on the Play Store.
Officially named “Threads, an Instagram app,” Meta says this is where “communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow. Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things.” From the app, you can follow the same people you follow on Instagram to start your network.
While some people could download the app for Android, Meta pulled out the software from the store, and even people who could get it couldn’t log in.
Meta could finally triumph in the Twitter territory
Many users declared the end of Twitter since Elon Musk took over the company last year, but people kept using the app to complain about it, so nothing really changed. While a few users migrated to Blue Sky and Mastodon, these social media platforms lack something only a few other companies could offer: a user base.
This Threads app, according to Paluzzi, will offer the ability for users to follow the same people they already follow on Instagram. That said, even if you, an Instagram user, are not on this platform, you technically already are.
That being said, the only possibility for Twitter to finally lose its user base is if the tweet limit issue continues and Instagram is ready to release Threads. Otherwise, this new app could have some early adoption but then be forgotten like the other social media apps.
BGR will keep following this tweet limit issue and when Meta plans to release this new app.
