Threads, Instagram’s answer to Twitter, is finally here. After months of rumours, and amid what seems like it could be the decline of Twitter, Meta has launched its own platform for posting short text updates and replying to those from others. The app arrived overnight and is already picking up momentum, gaining ten million of downloads and signups in its first few hours. But what is it actually like to use, and will it be the thing that finally takes over from Twitter? Here are some first impressions of using the app, in the first few hours it is available. First impressions: Signing up and following people The sign-up process is astonishingly slick, in large part because of the app’s integration with Instagram. (So if you don’t use Instagram already, it won’t be quite so impressive.) This is already an important contrast with other Twitter competitors, such as Mastodon and Bluesky, which have complicated signup processes that could very easily put off potential users. Signing up means downloading the app, clicking your already imported Instagram login, and then choosing which of the accounts you follow there to copy over to Threads. Once that is done, you will be taken to the news feed. From there, everything will look very familiar: it is a combination of Twitter and Instagram, and that’s exactly what it looks like. If you’ve used those apps, you’ll probably already have a perfect sense of how it works, and even if you haven’t then everything is built to be as obvious and intuitive as possible. What is Threads like to use? The Threads app is astonishingly neat, and it already puts Twitter to shame. Everything is nicely sized to ensure that you can read posts and scroll through them, and the news feed is easy to navigate through. It is, mostly, like one of the third-party clients for Twitter, which Elon Musk killed off soon after he took over the site. Just like them, you get the basic functions of Twitter – replies, profiles and so on – but repackaged into a much nicer design. One of the big problems will be deciding who to follow from Instagram. Being able to post nice pictures on there is in no way an indication of a person’s ability to write nice text updates, and many of the best posters on Twitter would have been useless on a picture-focused site. When I open up Threads, for instance, it has a large focus on the kind of organisational account that I tend to follow for their nice pictures on Instagram. Those accounts are not necessarily quite so fun in text form. The other big problem is that the app is a lot less useful until people actually start signing up. If you don’t follow people already, then the feed will instead try to fill itself with posts from others, picked via an algorithm; just as it does on Instagram, that algorithm tends to pick quite boring and not especially relevant posts. An app like Threads – just like Instagram and Twitter before it – are only really as good as the people you follow. For now, there are fewer people to follow, and so it’s hard to say exactly how good or bad the app might end up being. Will Threads kill Twitter? Many apps have tried to succeed Twitter. Many have failed. But Threads is stronger than those that have come before, and Twitter is weaker than it has ever been. So the fact that no app has yet unseated Twitter does not mean that it is doomed. Much of that strength comes in the backing of Meta. It means that the app is slick and highly functional at launch, and comes with an existing network of people imported from Instagram. And much of the weakness of Twitter comes from timing. The site has gone from problem to problem under Elon Musk – but feels particularly troubled at the moment, after a weekend that saw a flurry of technical issues that brought with them an unusual response. However, Twitter has long served an unusual function in society, far beyond its actual size. Celebrities and major organisations have used it to make announcements; the media has used it to report on them. That importance within society meant that it stuck around long after its users became frustrated with it (and was probably the reason Mr Musk bought it in the first place). But that importance has already been disappearing: as a result of technical issues, a falling reputation and more, many of the individuals and organisations that gave Twitter its value have already left. It’s very likely that no other app will ever be able to recreate the combination of societal heft and blazing speed that marked Twitter out at its best. Not even Twitter can really do that anymore. It’s unlikely that Twitter will actually die soon: social networks tend to die not with a bang but with a whimper, and there will be probably be people that stick around long after the site has lost its place in society. But it is safe to say that it is already shrinking, and that Threads could accelerate that. So Threads might eventually kill Twitter: it already has a better design, and is less likely to prove controversial, and looks well set up to take users from its competitor site. But it might also not actually need to kill Twitter, which is dying already and might never be replaced. Read More Threads: What it’s like to use Instagram’s new Twitter rival Meta’s new Twitter rival app Threads gets over 5 million sign-ups How to get and use ‘Threads’, the biggest new social app Mark Zuckerberg launches his ‘Twitter killer’ app called Threads Judge blocks Biden agencies from communicating with social media platforms Meta’s Twitter alternative Threads to be launched this week

Most antivirus companies that publish macOS antivirus tools started with Windows security products. Not Kyiv-based

It’s rare for corporate brands to become so intertwined with everyday conversation that they become verbs. It’s rarer

Reddit has stopped working for millions of users around the world. The mass outage comes amid a major boycott from thousands of the site’s administrators, who are protessting new changes to the platform. On 12 June, popular sub-Reddits like r/videos and r/bestof went dark in retaliation to proposed API (Application Programming Interface) charges for third-party app developers. Among the apps impacted by the new pricing is popular iOS app Apollo, which announced last week that it was unable to afford the new costs and would be shutting down. Apollo CEO Christian Selig claimed that Reddit would charge up to $20 million per year in order to operate, prompting the mass protest from Reddit communities. In a Q&A session on Reddit on Friday, the site’s CEO Steve Huffman defended the new pricing. “Some apps such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync have decided this pricing doesn’t work for their businesses and will close before pricing goes into effect,” said Mr Huffman, who goes by the Reddit username u/spez. “For the other apps, we will continue talking. We acknowledge that the timeline we gave was tight; we are happy to engage with folks who want to work with us.” In response to the latest outage, one Reddit user wrote on Twitter: “Spez, YOU broke Reddit.” Website health monitor DownDetector registered more than 7,000 outage reports for Reddit on Monday. Some users were greeted with the message: “Something went wrong. Just don’t panic.” Others received an error warning that stated: “Our CDN [content delivery network] was unable to reach our servers.” The Independent has reached out to Reddit for further information about the issues. More to follow. Read More Popular Reddit app Apollo shuts down as site’s users revolt against it Millions of Reddit users face a blackout over pricing revolt Elon Musk refuses to pay Twitter’s Google bill, leaving site in peril Elon Musk refuses to pay Twitter’s Google bill, leaving site in peril Apple’s headset is not the most important thing it announced this week Mark Zuckerberg reveals what he thinks about Apple’s headset – and it’s not good

US President Joe Biden and senior executives from top American tech firms including Google and Intel will meet Vietnamese business leaders Monday after the two countries agreed to deepen cooperation in...

State-sponsored Chinese hackers have infiltrated critical US infrastructure networks, the United States, its Western allies and Microsoft said Wednesday while warning that similar espionage...

Fortnite WILDS downtime begins on June 9 at 2 a.m. ET. Fortnite Chapter 4 Season 3 will take longer than usual to upload.

Prime Video is the seriously popular on-demand streaming service that hosts literally thousands of movies,

The United Auto Workers union calls a surprise strike at Ford's Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville, Microsoft is told by the IRS it owes $29 billion in back taxes, and Delta and Walgreens are scheduled to report quarterly earnings.

Nasa’s James Webb telescope’s most recent image of a distant star system has thrown up more questions than answers – literally. The image is of the star system Herbig Haro 46/47, and includes a cosmic object that is shaped like an actual question mark. Scientists think the entity could be a distant galaxy, or two galaxies interacting with one another. One larger galaxy could be distorting the cosmic cloud and gas of the other, for example, forming a shape similar to a question mark. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter The red colour of the unusually shaped object in the image suggests it is more distant than the other stars in the picture. “This may be the first time we’ve seen this particular object. Additional follow-up would be required to figure out what it is with any certainty. Webb is showing us many new, distant galaxies – so there’s a lot of new science to be done,” the US’s Space Telescope Science Institute, which manages Webb’s science operations, told Space.com. The star system in the foreground, dubbed Herbig-Haro 46/47, was captured by the Webb telescope’s powerful infrared cameras and consists of two young stars pulled to each other by gravity as they spin. An image reveals the stars as buried deeply, appearing as an orange-white splotch, surrounded by a disk of gas and dust that continued to add to their mass. JWST Finds a Cosmic Question Mark and a Starry Fountain www.youtube.com “Herbig-Haro 46/47 is an important object to study because it is relatively young – only a few thousand years old,” Nasa said in a statement. The pair of actively forming stars have two-sided orange lobes which were created by earlier ejections from these stars. Scientists said the two young stars could give more insight into how stars gather mass over time, given the fact that the process usually takes millions of years. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 18, 2023--

In space, discoveries continue to be made that challenge scientific beliefs, as distant objects reveal the solar system is much bigger than first thought and the observation was previously made that a part of the sun is broken. Now, there is evidence to suggest the existence of a ninth undiscovered planet that is at the very edge of the solar system and could point towards evidence that our understanding of gravity is wrong. The discovery was made by two scientists who studied the effects that the Milky Way galaxy had on objects in the solar system’s outer edge. Galaxies are able to rotate extremely fast without any of their contents escaping, and most experts believe that the existence of dark matter might explain why. Dark matter is invisible and does not emit, nor reflect light, and it is hypothesized that galaxies are surrounded by dark matter rings that bind the galaxies together in their own gravitation pull and stop them from emitting material. But now, the gravitational theory of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) may suggest that dark matter is not why galaxies stay intact despite staggering rotational speeds. Instead, some believe that under the rotational velocities experienced by galaxies, a new kind of gravitational behaviour occurs. Case Western Reverse scientist Harsh Mathur, explained: “MOND is really good at explaining galactic-scale observations, but I hadn’t expected that it would have noticeable effects on the outer solar system.” Planet 9 comes into play because objects in the Kuiper belt (the disk that surrounds the outer edges of the solar system) were observed clustering and exhibiting orbital anomalies that do not occur with other objects in the belt. Experts believe this may be due to the presence of an undiscovered ninth planet, as this is a phenomenon that occurred before with the discovery of new planets as their gravitation pull attracts other solar system objects. Katherine Brown, Hamilton College professor of physics, said: “We wanted to see if the data that support the Planet Nine hypothesis would effectively rule out MOND.” Their study revealed that the hypothesis could be correct and could point towards the existence of Planet 9, but they urged that their dataset was very small, so no definitive conclusions could be made. Brown explained: “Regardless of the outcome, this work highlights the potential for the outer solar system to serve as a laboratory for testing gravity and studying fundamental problems of physics.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.