Ten million users signed up for Meta’s newly launched Threads app in its first seven hours.

That’s according to the company’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg has pitched the app as a “friendly” rival to Twitter, which was bought by Elon Musk in October.

Threads is expected to attract Twitter users who are unhappy with recent changes to the platform.

Threads allows users to post up to 500 characters, and has many features similar to Twitter.

When asked whether the app will be “bigger than Twitter”, Mr Zuckerberg said: “It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”