There’s never been much love lost betweenTeslafounder Elon Musk andFacebookfounder Mark Zuckerberg. That competition only intensified after Zuckerberg’s Meta released Threads, anInstagram-based challenge to Musk’s X, formerly Twitter. So what is Threads, and how do you use it? Is it worth using? We’ve got all the basics in this guide.
A guide to getting started on Threads, plus tips and tricks
What is Threads?
Threads is an app from Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, andWhatsApp. It was designed and built by the Instagram team and is described as an app for sharing text updates and joining public conversations. In practice, it’s extremely similar to X – so much so that you can sometimes mistake a screenshot of one for the other. It was first launched on Jun 10, 2025, and as of the first quarter of 2024 had over 150 million active users.
The app allows you to post messages up to 500 characters in length, which is significantly higher than the 280 characters currently offered by X (unless you’re signed up to Premium) and the same as the default 500 characters offered byMastodon. Your posts can include photos, polls, audio, GIFs, web links, and videos up to five minutes long.
You don’t have to post anything if you don’t want to, of course. You can follow friends, family, celebrities, and businesses on the service. It nudges you into following the same accounts you follow on Instagram, which should provide plenty of fodder for your news feed.
How does Threads work?
Once you’ve downloaded theiPhoneorAndroidapp, or loaded thewebsite, you can sign in with your existing Instagram account if you have one. Your username will carry over to your Threads account, as will your verification if you have it. Profiles can be customized with an image, a bio, and/or a web link. You can also choose whether to make your profile private, but if you do, you won’t be able to reply to someone’s posts unless the person also follows you.
You can then choose to automatically follow the same accounts that you already follow on Instagram, in addition to finding new accounts to follow. The default For You feed is a mix of posts from people you follow and recommended content, but you’ll probably want toselect the Following feed,which only shows posts from people you follow, displayed in chronological order. With all that in place, you’re free to make your own posts and react to others.
How to post on Threads
Creating a post (a.k.a. thread) is quick and easy, and pretty intuitive if you’re familiar with X.
How to interact with posts on Threads
There are four main ways you can interact with existing threads, using the icons underneath them:
How to use search on Threads
Threads finally adds the much-requested keyword search.
Is anyone I’ve heard of on Threads?
Many famous people are on Threads. Some early adopters included Shakira, F1 driver Lando Norris, NBA player Seth Curry, soccer star Kingsley Coman, and everyone’s favorite sweary chef, Gordon Ramsay. Other big names include Hugh Jackman, Selena Gomez, Barack Obama, Will Smith, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Patton Oswalt, and Kim Kardashian.
The real question is how often you’ll see them post. While Threads is pretty lively, helped by Instagram integration and the controversy around Elon Musk (see below), X remains more popular overall and critical to celebrities' reputations.
What’s different about Threads?
Mostly, it’s that Instagram integration. Meta encourages interaction between the two apps, and the ludicrous popularity of Instagram is one of the things keeping Threads growing. You don’t have to care about Instagram to use Threads, but gravity could easily draw you in.
Threads also has a different socio-political climate. Whereas Musk stripped back some of Twitter’s content moderation when transforming it into X, Threads is governed under the same rules as Instagram, potentially making it a little friendlier. That’s not to say you can’t have a friendly experience on X, depending on who you follow and interact with – it’s just that there have been many controversies around hate speech and other offensive material. Some users have drifted away because of Musk himself, who has become increasingly right-wing in recent years.
The last difference is support for ActivityPub. While compatibility is currently limited to beta users in a handful of countries, ActivityPub is an open and decentralized protocol meant to link different social networks via the “fediverse.” The ultimate goal is to allow people on Threads to interact with users on platforms like WordPress and Mastodon without having to switch apps. At the moment, though, the main thing you can do is share Threads posts on ActivityPub servers and react to them.
Is Threads safe?
Threads offers many of the features that are built into Instagram to help you filter out content you’d rather not see. You can control who can reply to you or mention you in a post, and you can add a word filter so that any posts containing those words don’t appear in your feed or in your replies. Any accounts you’veblocked on Instagramare automatically blocked on Threads too, and you can unfollow, restrict, or block accounts from directly within Threads.
As mentioned, Threads is covered by Instagram’s Community Guidelines, which places restrictions on things like nudity, spam, hate speech, or content intended to degrade or shame private individuals. In most cases that makes things relatively benign, but people may sometimes find a way to skirt those rules, and of course it’s still possible for people to trade insults and get into heated arguments. It’s not a network suited to kids.
A greater concern is the possibility of having your account hacked. That could lead to not just to identity theft, but breaches on other sites that rely on Instagram logins. We’d strongly suggest enablingtwo-factor authenticationfor your Instagram account.
Does Threads respect privacy?
It’s an app owned by Meta, which has had many complaints around collecting user data for ads and marketing, so be aware of that going in. There does seem to be a focus on privacy in other respects, however. Anyone under 18, or under 16 in some countries, is automatically set up with a private profile when they first sign in. They can then approve users who want to follow them, just like Instagram. And many of the other privacy features that appear on Instagram are included, such as the ability to block or report people.
Where is Threads available?
Threads rolled out in more than 100 countries around the world in July 2023. When it first launched, Threads wasn’t available in European Union countries due to the region’s strict data privacy laws. That barrier was lifted in December the same year, so now there are very few places where it’s inaccessible. The biggest exception is China, which forced out Threads, WhatsApp, and Signal over US government efforts toban TikTok. We wouldn’t expect it back there anytime soon.
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