You can now add text posts on TikTok

Users of TikTok can now publish text-based updates in addition to videos and collections of photographs, competing with Twitter’s microblogging hegemony are services like Meta’s Threads.

Users may add a background color, change how text appears, and add music and stickers to text posts to make them look more like Instagram Stories. The character limit for posts is 1,000. Like how they interact with video, other users can also interact with the post by stitching, dueting, and commenting.

It’s intriguing in and of itself to see the firm behind the tsunami of short-form video add text functionality, but it’s also important to consider the time. Platforms like Threads, BlueSky, Mastodon, and a plethora of others are vying for prominence as Twitter alternatives, or at the very least as something that comes close to what makes Twitter entertaining. However, as the platform gradually loses functionality, users, and even its recognizable bird emblem, a window opens for new apps to enter the market. At the very least, TikTok seems intrigued.

Following the debut of Threads earlier this month, Meta, TikTok’s primary short-form video rival, enjoyed a record-breaking week. Will it last, though? Since its height, the number of daily users has drastically decreased, and some users have stopped using Meta because there is currently no feed that is only comprised of the profiles they follow (though Meta claims this is in the works).