The similarities between Threads and Twitter are no secret, with some dubbing it “Gen Z’s Takeover of Twitter”. However, with 100 million users and growing, the new app seems like it’s attracting many more than just Gen Z. Whether Threads will retain its popularity remains to be seen. 

What we do know is, Threads is serving up social share preview images in totally different sizes than you’d expect. Since Facebook/Meta, the maker of Threads, created the Open Graph protocol used by most social media apps, we expected them to serve og data in a similar way to how Facebook and Twitter do.

The in-app experience is what you’d expect.

We’re viewing this on a Samsung Galaxy S20 which has a 1440px wide screen.  

Here we have an in-feed view (profile photo on the left, causing the Thread to display slightly condensed):

OG Image Size: 856x458px (1.9:1)

And here’s the Thread view (profile photo at the top, allowing for the Thread to take the full width of the screen):

OG Image Size: 1010x538px (1.9:1)

This 1.9:1 ratio is what we’d expect. However, things are very different in-browser! 

Let’s start with our browser size at 960px wide.

Here we have the feed or profile view with an OG image width of 566x213px. That is a 2.6:1 ratio!  

The Thread view in a 960px wide browser is 614x237px (also 2.6:1).

But, when we start shrinking our browser window, not only does the image size change, the ratio changes dramatically!

Keep in mind, Threads is brand new, and we should expect changes in the coming weeks and months, especially to the web view.

It does appear they are pulling in the OG image, the OG Title, and the Page URL. If you have your website configured to show OG meta data for other social platforms, it will work just fine on Threads.

The key takeaway here is that within the web view, things are going to show wider than with any other platform we’ve seen. Keep in mind your images may appear oddly cropped in the web view as you can see in the video above.