Technology

I'm lowkey pumped about Threads even though I'll never use it because of the prospect of Elon having to sell cheap

4. Profit

Or

1. Everyone move to Threads
2. Elon is forced to sell Twitter for $50k
3. Everyone leave Threads and go to BlueSky

Yeah, I really don't get it. I understand people staying on Twitter because that's sunk cost. They don't want to lose their notoriety. But what the hell is the point of using Threads? Everything I've read about it makes it sound awful.

This article said all I needed to know:

Imagine an active comment section on an Instagram post on someone you follow. Not great, eh?

Now imagine that same comment section, make it infinitely long, AND give users the ability to include images, videos, and links that you can’t avoid seeing.

That’s Threads.

Instagram has more than 2 billion active users, and each (non-EU) Instagram user can conveniently login Threads just pressing a button. If they're fudging the numbers, activating only 1.5% of their potential userbase seems odd. Why not activating hundreds of millions of accounts?

As for the posts, an average of 3.2 posts/users for just the first day sounds reasonable to me.

Meta has several billion active users across their platforms. 30M is nothing to them.

Also don’t forget that we’re talking about a microblog, so it will inherently generate a large amount of individual posts, much more so than e.g Instagram. The quality is however likely very low initially and a lot of users are probably just trying out the current talk of the day.

I do suspect that Threads will probably grow to a few hundred million users before the end of the year; anything less would probably be regarded as a colossal failure for Meta.

Hhaa, what do you post about?

Tweet me baby, one more time.

The former Prime Minister of my country follows me on twitter as well

Edit: also an actor from Scrubs, but not one of the main ones

Well tell Brittany where she can find you on the next platform! 😁

If people like it, great, it’s just not for me.

I've gotta say, it's very refreshing to see this attitude, since the main attitude I've seen here is "This is popular with normies who listen to bad music and like dumb celebrities, therefore it's bad and terrible and I hate it!"

With their privacy policies they probably can't launch in Europe without getting fined into oblivion.

And that's a good thing

I haven't been following anything regarding Threads so I assumed it was out here in Europe too, it's actually a relief that it isn't. Won't stay long like this, but it's something.

Except it is nowhere near a monopoly in the social media space. There are so many general options, and specific forums for topics, etc. That's not even to mention the fact that just because something doesn't provide the exact same service doesn't mean it's not a competitor. In person communication, VoIP, etc are also competitors to social media.

Unfortunately that is the power of marketing, an already established user base and a low barrier of entry. People who have Instagram accounts already have a Threads account, and people who have a Facebook account already have an Instagram account. It's much easier to get them to try than it is to get people to sign up for any Fediverse instance.

I just hope that once it opens to the Fediverse, people who are already there can feel more comfortable to make the leap and drop Meta. Because Meta is not going to let the users drive the experience anyway.

25 million spambots, 5 million users.

Yeah that fake positivity came from Instagram. It's like staring at an alternate reality.

I don’t think it’s millions of bots, unless you are using that term derogatorily like some use “NPC.”

The media are pushing Threads with every fiber of their being. Tech-adjacent sites like TheVerge are absolutely unuseable right now because like 9/10 stories on their page are about how great Threads is and everyone should go to Threads and “hey, follow me on Threads.”

People need to acknowledge modern journalists/reporters/staff writers for what they are: influencers. That’s why they love Twitter. That’s why they love Threads. That’s why they demand corpo algorithms to boost their content and force it upon other people.

And that’s why they repeat a lie about the fediverse so insistently: that it is hard to get into. It is so hard to pick one of the top 2 largest sites and give them a username, password, and sometimes an email address. Journalists/writers generally don’t like Mastodon because it doesn’t force anything onto users. That means they have to organically earn a following.

But Meta will just give it to them by forcing users to see their posts.

Instagram has 2 billion active users. So only 1.5% of users have activated Threads.

These numbers aren't extremely high, we just don't realize the scale of the world outside our little fedi-bubble.