The Threads app, which will be connected to Instagram, has already appeared in the Apple App store but is yet to land in Google's Play Store.

The app is being plugged as a place “where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what'll be trending tomorrow”.

The promotional material also says: “Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favourite creators and others who love the same things – or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world."

Twitter, which has been in one form of strife or another from the time Musk bought the site in October last year, started limiting the number of tweets that different classes of users could view.

A screenshot of the website for Threads where a countdown is in progress.

The initial limits placed were: verified accounts can read 6000 posts per day; unverified accounts can read 600 posts a day; and new unverified accounts are limited to 300 a day.

Musk claimed this had been done in order "to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation".

Later, he tweeted that these had been increased to 10,000, 1000 and 500 respectively for the three classes of users.

Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

Twitter has lost many of its users after Musk completed his purchase of what is called the bird site for US$44 billion.

His loosening of rules around the kind of language that can be used on Twitter and reinstating many accounts which had been banned have not gone down well with many regulars.

But many who have left and joined Mastodon have expressed issues with the level of difficulty they face in using that site.