Threads spent its first year as the network you could read programmatically and not write to. That changed: there is a real publishing API now, and it works. It is also narrower than most people assume, and the gap is where scheduling tools quietly fail.
What it publishes
- Text posts — the obvious one, and the one it does best
- Images — a single image with the text as its body
- Video — same container idea as Instagram, same asynchronous processing
- Carousels — several items in one post
- Replies — including replies to your own posts, which is how threads get made
The shape will feel familiar if you have touched Instagram publishing: you create a container, wait for the platform to accept the media, then publish the container. It is the same two-step dance, which means it fails the same way when a tool skips the waiting.
What it does not do
There is no direct-message access. There is no way to read someone else’s feed. There is no editing a post after it is published, and no scheduling built into the platform — the scheduling has to live in your tool, on a server that is awake at the moment you picked.
Threads allows one tag per post. Not one recommended, one allowed. If your cross-posting pastes an Instagram caption wholesale, the tag wall does not shrink politely — the post is simply rejected or the extra tags are dropped.
The limits worth knowing
There is a daily ceiling on posts and a separate, higher one on replies. For a person posting a few times a day it is invisible. It matters for an agency running many accounts through one app, and it is the reason a good tool queues rather than retries hard.
Whether it is worth connecting
Threads rewards being talked to rather than announced at. A post that ends in a statement someone can disagree with does better than the same news written as a press line. That is a writing difference, not a settings one — which is exactly why pasting the same caption into five networks reads flat on this one.