Meta publishes Threads Dictionary to help newcomers decipher the jargon

For many people the release of Threads, Instagram's text-based conversation app, represents an alternative to Twitter -- a platform which is widely considered to have become more toxic and problematic under Elon Musk. But for an even larger number of people, Threads will be their first step into this type of social media.

Switching from Twitter, Mastodon or Bluesky to Threads -- or using them in conjunction with each other -- is painless, but for anyone who has never used such a platform, the language surrounding it can be slightly mystifying. And this is why Meta has released a Threads Dictionary to bring users up to speed.

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As Meta has launched Threads as a service that is tightly associated with Instagram  -- to the extent that if you close your Threads account, you'll also lose your Instagram account -- it is little surprising to find that the Threads Dictionary was shared on the Threadsapp Instagram account.

While the language surrounding Twitter has become so widely used that even non-users are aware of what a tweet is and what it means to retweet something, the same does not yet apply to Threads. In its (currently very short) dictionary, Meta makes it clear that Threads’ equivalent of a tweet is a thread. And a thread is posted, reposted or quoted.

In comments on its own Instagram post, the Threads team makes it clear that there are not really any hard and fast rules. It says: "We've heard some people call posting "threading" or "stitching" -- that's cool, be creative, do your thing."

For readers of BetaNews, the almost laughably brief dictionary is likely to be entirely unnecessary but Threads is catering to Meta's massive Facebook and Instagram userbase -- a userbase whose technical expertise, knowledge of jargon as so on, ranges from complete novice to expert.