Earlier this year, Meta’s small team of engineers started working on new app ideas. It has all the features people expect from a text-based conversation app, but it has one very important and distinctive goal. It is an app that allows people to share content on multiple platforms. We wanted to build a decentralized (or federated) app that would allow anyone to post publicly viewable content to other social apps and vice versa.
On July 5th, something amazing happened when people logged into Instagram. This is an invitation to try out our new app for sharing texts and participating in public conversations. thread.
Five days later, over 100 million people joined Threads, making it the most successful app release in history.
A small, agile engineering team working with Meta’s infrastructure team was able to go from zero to 100 million threads in record time without significant downtime. The story of its development and initial launch is the story of Meta’s ability to scale with speed and impact. But Threads is still evolving. We are committed to making Threads compatible with open, interoperable social networks. We believe this is how people’s content can live in the Federal and shape the future of the platform-independent internet.
Thread planning and development
Threads was developed in a startup-like environment. Creating a new app with such a small team meant assembling a group with a high level of trust. There, everyone was aligned towards a single goal and worked closely with leaders like Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram. People had to move quickly and work independently, even though the team had grown to about 60 engineers in a few months. Daily burndown syncs, prioritizing tasks in meetings, and setting monthly milestones were key.
how to use instagram Python (Django) It’s for the backend. By using the same backend for Threads, you can leverage much of Threads’ existing technology stack and reuse most of your existing data model, business logic, security features, and server infrastructure. This also meant that users could sign in to the app using their existing Instagram account, making onboarding and setting up the Threads app very easy.
The Threads mobile app itself was built primarily using Swift on iOS and Jetpack Compose on Android. But building an app that needs to be ready to launch at any moment, and progressing along such a rigid timeline, is the core of the minimum viable functionality that the app can realistically deploy. It meant that the set had to be decided very deliberately. Features such as keyword search and private messaging, which were rolled out to more countries today, were put on hold for later updates, as were decentralized features.
And you can’t go from zero to 100 million users without an infrastructure that can handle that level of growth efficiently and reliably. Thanks to that, he successfully scaled the thread to his 100 million users without any significant downtime. Meta’s underlying infrastructure And the engineering foundation essential to a successful launch.
Over the years, Meta’s massive infrastructure, foundation, production, and engineering teams have already done a lot of the heavy lifting to build the infrastructure that allows for thread scaling. Without this level of close collaboration, we wouldn’t have been able to scale the app to so many people so quickly.
Start Thread
With everything going full steam ahead for the July release, our team saw an opportunity to release the app early and took advantage of it. On the positive side, it means Meta can offer new social apps when people want new experiences. But the early rollout also meant a challenge to shorten the time to dark testing and ensure that the distribution channels were properly configured.
Once a launch decision was made, we set up launch chambers with teams in San Francisco, Menlo Park, New York and London. Engineers were drawn from all departments: infrastructure teams, product teams, and on-call engineers. Meta has internal monitoring tools such as: ODS and scuba This helps you track key metrics displayed on your dashboard during launch to monitor your app’s health. Proper adoption of such tools was an important part of addressing the scaling challenges that arose during the launch.
Some engineers on the Threads team had previously worked on this feature launch, while others hadn’t. But for an infrastructure engineer, it was just another day at the office. On launch day, we had great engineers throughout the process, especially production engineers, who kept us all together and coordinated what was to be done.
the future is decentralized
Shortly after launch, we realized that people Verify your identity using Thread Profile On supported platforms such as Mastodon.
Some may not be familiar with the concept of a fediverse, but the easiest analogy for me is to think of it like email. Let’s say one person uses his Gmail and another uses Yahoo Mail. There’s no question that one can be on the Google platform and the other on Yahoo and still be able to send and receive emails to each other. The reason is that email is interoperable and these two companies adhere to his SMTP protocol for email delivery. But with social media today, you can’t do that. For example, people on Instagram can’t follow other creators on Tumblr.
The goal of Threads is to make social content as interoperable as email. We are working on a feature to consolidate threads. activity pub, an open decentralized social networking protocol. Once that happens, people will be able to enjoy the best of Threads across a variety of platforms. More importantly, it will give you more control over your social presence online, regardless of app or platform. You’ll be able to distribute your posts to other social media apps and consume content from creators in other apps on your threads.
It’s all about connecting more people and helping the world become more open.
code win argument
Now that Threads is out there, we’ve decided to shift our focus to improving the product, continuing to build new features, and filling in the feature gaps that people have come to expect from apps like Threads.recently launched threads on the web Other new feature updates have already rolled out, including feed following, the ability to edit alt text, and the ability to share threads to Instagram DMs.
Last week, Meta announced that it began testing keyword search, which allows users to search for specific keywords of interest. Today, we announced that we will start rolling out this feature in countries where most people post in English and Spanish. Languages such as Argentinian, Indian, Mexican, UK, US are available on both mobile and web.
A Threads app could have been built and designed in a million different ways. But we were able to complete the technical work on the new app in five months because we had the freedom to work in a completely greenfield space where we could build prototypes, test ideas, and get internal feedback. Because we got it quickly.
Code wins the argument. If we tested a feature and didn’t like it, we rebuilt it until we found the best version. For some surfaces, such as the Activity Feed, he rewrote it three times before finally arriving at an implementation he was happy with.
My ultimate wish for Threads is that it becomes the zeitgeist of the Internet. The place to go when you want to have a positive conversation about the latest cultural events. This is the place you want to go to see the latest conversations between creators or other interested people. We really hope that happens in the coming months as we continue to improve our product for you. .