Topic: The inside story of Meta’s newest social app

Earlier this year, a small team of engineers at Meta started brainstorming ideas for a new app. It will have all the features people expect from a text-based conversation app, but with a very important and special goal – to be an app that allows people to share their content on multiple platforms. We want to build a decentralized (or federated) application that allows anyone to post content that can be viewed by anyone on other social applications, and vice versa.

On July 5, people were greeted with a surprise when logging into Instagram – an invitation to try out a brand new app for sharing texts and participating in public conversations – topic.

Five days later, more than 100 million people had joined Threads, making it the most successful app launch of all time.

It took a small, nimble engineering team working alongside Meta’s infrastructure teams to take Threads from zero to 100 million people in record time without major downtime. The story of its growth and initial launch is a story of Meta’s ability to scale with speed and impact. But Threads is still growing. We’re working to make Threads compatible with the open, interoperable social networks that we believe can shape the future of the Internet – where everyone’s content lives in a federal universe and platform independent.

Plan and develop the theme

Threads was developed in an environment more akin to a startup. Creating a new application with such a small team means assembling a team with a high level of trust – where everyone is working towards a single goal and has strong alignment with our leadership, such as Instagram Director, Adam Mosseri. Everyone had to move quickly and work independently, even as the team grew to about 60 engineers in just a few months. Synchronizing daily logs where we meet to prioritize tasks and set monthly milestones is important.

use Instagram Python (Django) for its backend. By using the same backend for Themes, we can leverage a lot of the existing technology stack for Themes and reuse most of the data models, business logic, security features and our existing server infrastructure. This also means users can log into the app using their existing Instagram account, making installing and setting up your Threads app super simple.

The Threads mobile apps themselves are built primarily using Swift on iOS and Jetpack Compose on Android. However, building an app that needs to be ready to launch at any time and moves on such a strict timeline means we have to be very intentional in defining a core set of features. Minimum viable capabilities that the application can realistically deploy. Features like keyword search, now rolling out in more countries, and private messaging have been paused for later updates, as have decentralized features.

You also can’t go from 0 to 100 million users without infrastructure in place that can handle that growth efficiently and reliably. Threads successfully scaled to 100 million users without any major downtime thanks to Meta’s basic infrastructure and technical foundation, which are crucial to a successful launch.

Over the years, Meta’s larger infrastructure, platform, production, and engineering teams have done a lot of the heavy lifting to build the infrastructure that allows us to scale Threads. Without this level of close collaboration, we wouldn’t be able to support scaling the app to so many people so quickly.

Theme launch

As things were moving full speed towards a July launch, our team saw and took advantage of the opportunity to release the app early. On the other hand, this means Meta will be able to deliver a new social app at a time when people are excited for new experiences. But previous implementations also meant challenges around reducing dark testing times and ensuring distribution channels were configured properly.

Once we decided to launch, we set up launch rooms with teams across San Francisco, Menlo Park, New York, and London. Engineers from all parts of the Infrastructure team, product team as well as on-demand engineers are invited to participate. At Meta, we have internal monitoring tools such as ODS And Diving helps us monitor important metrics displayed on the dashboard throughout the launch process to monitor application health. Having tools like these in place is an important part of solving the scaling challenges that arise at launch.

Some engineers on the Threads team have worked on developing this capability before, while others have not. But for infrastructure engineers, this is just another day at the office. On launch day, we had engineers, especially production engineers, who were amazing throughout the whole process – bringing us all together and coordinating what we needed to do.

The future is decentralized

Shortly after launch, we signaled that we were taking open standards seriously with Threads by allowing anyone to use their Topic profile to verify their identity on supported platforms such as Mastodon.

Some people are unfamiliar with the idea of ​​a fediverse, but for me, the simplest comparison is to think of it as email. Let’s say someone uses Gmail and another person uses Yahoo Mail. We have no doubt that they can send and receive emails to each other, even though one email is on the Google platform and the other on Yahoo. That’s because email is interoperable and both of these companies adhere to the SMTP protocol for sending emails. But today you can’t do that on social media. For example, people on Instagram can’t follow other creators on Tumblr.

Our goal with Threads is to make social content as interactive as email. We’re working on Theme’s integration with ActivityPub, an open, decentralized social network protocol. When that happens, everyone will be able to enjoy Threads’ best features across platforms. More importantly, they will be able to have more control over their online social presence, regardless of the app or platform. They will have the ability to distribute their posts to other social media applications and use content from creators on other applications on Topics.

It’s all about connecting with more people and making the world more open.

The code wins the argument

Now that Threads is out in the world, we’ve shifted our focus to product innovation, continuing to build new features and closing the feature gap people expect from an app like Threads . We recently launched Topics on the Web and other new feature updates have been rolled out, including Feed Following, the ability to edit alt text, and the ability to share Topics to Instagram DMs.

Last week, Meta announced that we had begun testing a keyword search feature, allowing people to search for specific keywords that interest them. Today, we announced that we will begin rolling out this feature in English and Spanish, in countries where most people post in these languages. languages ​​– such as Argentina, India, Mexico, UK, and US – on both mobile and web.

We could have built and designed the Threads app a million different ways. But we can complete the engineering work for a new app in 5 months because we are free to operate in a completely green space where we can prototype things, test ideas your ideas and receive internal feedback very quickly.

The code wins the argument. If we tested a feature and didn’t like it, we’d rebuild it until we got the best version. For some platforms, such as the activity feed, we rewrote it three times before finally arriving at an implementation that I felt was good enough.

My ultimate hope for Threads is that it becomes the zeitgeist of the Internet. It will be your go-to place for positive conversations about the latest cultural happenings. It’ll be the place you want to go to see the latest conversations between creators or between others you care about. I really hope to see that happen over the next few months as we continue to improve the product for all of you.