Mark Zuckerberg has long wanted to dislodge Twitter and provide the central place for public conversation online. Yet Twitter has remained stubbornly irreplaceable. That hasn’t stopped Zuckerberg.

On Monday, his company, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, teased a new app aimed squarely at Twitter’s territory.

The app, which is called Threads and is connected to Instagram, appeared in Apple’s App Store for users to sign up to download on Thursday, when it will be released.

The app appears to function much like Twitter, emphasising public conversations, with users able to follow people they already do on Instagram. Some techies have referred to the coming app as a “Twitter killer”.

Zuckerberg is striking while Twitter undergoes fresh turmoil. Since Elon Musk bought the social platform last year, he has changed the service by tinkering with Twitter’s algorithm that decides which posts are most visible, thrown out content moderation rules that ban certain kinds of tweets and overhauled a verification process that confirms the identities of users.

Then over the weekend, Musk imposed limits on how many tweets its users would be able to read when using the app. He said the move was in response to other companies taking Twitter’s data in a process called “scraping”.

Twitter’s users were soon met with messages that they had exceeded their “rate limit”, effectively making the app unusable after a short amount of time viewing posts. Many Twitter users became frustrated.

The latest turbulence at Twitter appears to have given Zuckerberg an opening for Threads. Meta’s executives have discussed how to capitalise on the chaos at Twitter since last year, including by building a rival service.

NYTNS