On Wednesday Meta launched Threads, a new social media app designed to compete with Twitter. It's already signed up 30 million users, and you'd think this would be broadly welcomed since Twitter users have been bitching forever that Twitter is a cesspool that's only gotten worse since it was purchased last year and subjected to increasingly ham-handed mutilations by its new owner, Elon Musk.
But Rebecca Jennings is not impressed:
Logging onto Threads is like logging on to the internet roughly a decade ago. I have now seen two strangers share their “hot take” that actually, pineapple on pizza is good, a sentiment copied and pasted from all the world’s most boring Hinge profiles....Threads is Twitter for people who are scared of Twitter.
....Twitter is a platform that attracts a certain type of person....The best Twitter users aren’t people who are looking for sponsorship deals or mugging in front of a camera; by replicating your follower list from Instagram to Threads, you’re not necessarily seeing posts by interesting or funny people. Instead you’re seeing posts from acquaintances, brands, and influencers, and these are not the people who are going to invent the internet’s next best posting format or a new genre of humor. There is nothing revelatory or novel about what’s happening on Threads....For now it’s simply a much less interesting version of Twitter.
Tough crowd! I mean, Threads is two days old. Give it time. A year or two from now I'm sure it will be every bit the cesspool Twitter is today.
Right. Everybody has been constipated ever since Boy Genius took over the bird app.
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Who knows, maybe Kevin is right. But I doubt it, and the reason is FB carefully controls traffic.
Twitter, despite febrile claims, Twitter did not shadowban people before Space Karen took over. If you asked to see someone's tweets, you'd see them. FB's control, management and monetization of who sees what is the entire point of FB. So I fully expect Threads to stay a boring promoter of self-promoters, drop shipping and brand adverts.
Meanwhile, I'm personally perfectly fine with Mastodon staying uncool. I get to hang out with with my fellow art and infosec nerds and nobody tries to sell me Ivermectin. If Zuckerthreads actually does federate, I'll worry about what that means for my instance later.
Only Instagram users can sign up. Instagram, like Facebook, is mostly for attractive and normal people.
They don't stir the internet drink, especially in writing.
Now at 70 million users, two days after launch. That's about 1/6 the size of the Twitter user base. It's almost certain to reach several hundred million this summer. It could be larger than Twitter this year or next, though the lack of presence in Europe will limit growth at some point.
Hard to predict the future but I'm pretty damn sure you're wrong about this:
A year or two from now I'm sure it will be every bit the cesspool Twitter is today.
Twitter became the hellhole it is for a few reasons. It was virtually unmoderated for years, and a certain toxic culture set in during the Jack years. Also, it became the megaphone for a couple of outsize transgressive personalities, Donald Trump and Elon Musk. There was a window in there when the moderation did actually moderate the discourse, tools enabled posters to control the trolls, and there was a trend toward relative civility. But once Musk took over, it's been straight downhill.
Twitter today is awful not because Musk has let the bad guys take over. It's because he's actively promoting the bad guys. He's their ringleader. His politics is radical, his personality is unhinged, and his civility is nonexistent. He controls the algos and has killed the user experience for anyone not on the right. The vibe there is like a mortuary.
There is no corollary with Threads. So far the people in charge (Zuckerberg, Mosseri) and doing and saying all the right things. I'm no fan of Zuck's but he's not the toxic, dangerous billionaire that Musk is. In fact, I think maybe he's learned a few things. Facebook is a big but dying platform in part because the right-wingers have poisoned it. Every time the right whined about moderation, Z caved. He ought to understand by now a big, sustainable platform requires reining in the toxic lies and disinformation if you want the public to stick around. Easier said than done. Time will tell how successful Threads is at that.
Threads not only has tens of millions of users, it has major news outlets and major brands already active on the service. This is nothing like the other Twitter alternatives that have started up. By the time the election campaigns heat up next year, I would expect Threads to be a major, if not the dominant, social media platform for the conversations. Threads has a few hurdles to get over, new features to roll out, and as it does it will gain traction. It's a platform that's building and that's a better experience than being part of something that's falling apart.
I doubt I would ever sign up to Threads.
It would seem like nothing but signing my life over to be monetized by Zuckerberg, which seems a mile less agreeable than Google or Twitter or Amazon.
Did you just say that Threads "seems a mile less agreeable than Google or Twitter or Amazon."? Twitter?? This is sarcasm right?
I've never found Twitter nearly as disagreeable as all the complaining about it would suggest.
Twitter and Amazon and Google are just the demonic things you have to deal with, but people live in Facebook and Instagram, --they're the warm, seeming dull and friendly things that lure your soul to hell.
I also don't understand the controversy surrounding Twitter. It's no worse than early freewheelin' YouTube was, and that wasn't bedlam.
Ms Jennings must be Veruca Salt’s (grand) niece.
There was nothing revolutionary about twitter either. Twitter, threads, Reddit, etc are all just crappier versions of moderated usenet groups twitter being by far the crappiest as it is like unmoderated usenet groups except with ads and an idiotic character limit.
That's the best analysis of social media sites I have heard in a long time.
Now will someone do to Facebook what Threads is doing to Twitter? For years the answer to Facebook has been obvious: make the security settings simple and clear, and allow people to choose to only see posts from some small group of their “friends”. Yet no one has done this, apparently because Silicon Valley billionaires are geniuses and know what we want without asking
The future of social media is the social media protocol, and in this specific case, ActivityPub.
There are cesspools in the Fediverse. TruthSocial is actually a part of the Fediverse. There are skinhead servers/instances in the Fediverse, too.
They are blocked (defederated) by the mainstream instances/servers, and when your instance/server does not, individuals can still block entire instances/servers.
When Threads joins the Fediverse, there will be no need to join Threads; you can join an instance/server in the Fediverse that hasn't joined the pledge to block (defederate) Threads, or create your own instance/server in the Fediverse and connect with Threads accounts.
It's not whether or not Threads will conquer birdsite; it's about how ActivityPub breaks down social media's walled gardens.
Fediverse??
Peer into it.
Pixelfed is like Flickr.
PeerTube is like YouTube.
Misskey, Mastodon is for microblogging, like birdsite.
Lemmy, and Kbin are like Reddit.
Here's how Instagram explains it (and quite well):