Meta launches its new social media platform: More than 5 million people sign up to Threads within first hours

Meta launched today its new social media platform, Threads, which is, in fact, its analogue of Twitter. 

The CEO of the company, Mark Zuckerberg, said that more than 5 million people registered on this social media platform in the first hours of its launch.

"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. Hopefully we will," Zuckerberg wrote in Threads.

Accounts for brands like Billboard, HBO, NPR, and Netflix were created on Threads within minutes of its launch. Zuckerberg confirmed that Shakira and Gordon Ramsay are among the first celebrities to sign up for this social media platform.

Users of the new social media platform can log in with an Instagram account. Once signed up, they can follow the same accounts they follow on Instagram if they've also joined the new social media platform.

The new app is very similar to Twitter, although some wording has changed, such as a “retweet” is called a "repost" and a “tweet” is called a "thread."

Posts on Threads can be up to 500 characters long. For comparison, that's 280 characters for most Twitter users. 
Here, users can post videos up to five minutes long. 

Users of Threads can unsubscribe, block, limit messages, and filter replies by specific words.

The new social media platform is currently available in more than 100 countries.