Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, has launched Threads, a new text-based app that aims to compete with Twitter. The app allows users to post text and links, reply to messages, and repost content from others. Users can also port over their existing follower lists and account names from Instagram. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that there should be a public conversations app with over 1 billion users, and that Twitter has failed to achieve this. Threads is built on the same ActivityPub social-networking protocol as Mastodon, allowing users to interact with a wider community beyond Instagram in the future.