SMS service starts today in Austria

Threads, a short messaging service from Facebook’s Meta group, was also launched in the European Union on Thursday. The service is an alternative to Elon Musk’s online platform X (formerly Twitter) or emerging services like Bluesky. Threads is based on Meta’s Instagram photo and video platform. Therefore, your Instagram login data can be used to log in to Threads. You can also use the service without a profile, but then you cannot create your own posts.

When Threads launched in July, Meta left the EU and opted for more than 100 other countries. The group justified this with legal ambiguity regarding “new digital laws.” According to observers, this could mean the dual package of the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) – and the automatic linking of user data from Instagram and Threads is likely to cause problems for Meta.

The “spoiler” can be hidden.

Threads has nearly 100 million users who are active at least once a month, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and head of Meta, said in October. After launching in July, Threads surpassed 100 million registrations in just a few days. However, user activity decreased again. Zuckerberg was also convinced that Threads could become a service with a billion users within a few years. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, announced last October that Threads may finally become available in the European Union within a few months.

In terms of presentation, Threads is very similar to Elon Musk’s service – posts are “liked” with a heart icon and “reposted” with two arrows. Funny addon: If posts contain words like “spoiler” or “epilogue,” you can hide them automatically.