Meta’s new text-based social app Threads has quickly gained 100 million users since launching last week, which appears to be negatively impacting traffic on Twitter. According to web analytics, Twitter traffic declined 5-11% over the first two days Threads was available compared to the previous week. Threads was able to grow rapidly by allowing users to sign up with their existing Instagram accounts and bring over some of their followers. However, Threads has not yet launched in Europe due to regulatory issues. The fast growth of Threads may solidify its position as a real competitor to Twitter, which has over 238 million daily active users.

  • This is a moment when I’d love to use the “you love to see it” meme comment, but it’s more like… “People are fleeing the burning building, and running across the street to an identical building that is infested with rats and cockroaches!”

        •  pvr   ( @pvr@beehaw.org ) 
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          41 year ago

          I think initially there will be some limitations. And there are definitely flaws and limitations with activitypub. Maybe this will push the protocol forward to be better.

          But if they really break it, why not fork it and not worry about Threads?

          I think it’s funny that people think that Meta will kill the Fediverse. Just like Google “killed” xmpp. I think neither is true.

          • Sure, if Meta isn’t going to act actively malicious, and they will. That is their standard operating procedure. How anyone can look at how Facebook has operated and say, “Ah yes, they’ll be a good neighbor,” is beyond me. We should be walling them off and let them be a cancer onto themselves, rather than let them in the ecosystem and then turn malignant.

        •  pvr   ( @pvr@beehaw.org ) 
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          21 year ago

          Adam Mosseri (the actual person behind Threads) in the podcast that I linked in a different comment said that’s one of the goals of Threads.

          I doubt it’s going to happen in the next week or two but it seems like they are embracing activitypub.

          It’s a pretty solid interview. It’s a podcast called hard fork.

          Of course Adam knows how to PR and take some of the things he says with a grain of salt but he seems pretty candid.

    •  hh93   ( @hh93@lemm.ee ) 
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      161 year ago

      Yeah - stuff like this should REALLY be public infrastructure

      I know a lot of people are opposed to the state running things but I really wouldn’t mind if there was a well-managed state-run federated instance for all of this

      at least with Matrix Europe is already doing something like this since it’s the de-facto-standard for a lot of the internal chats - but there really needs to be a push to make it more popular.

      Having the kind of “lock-in” that Meta has where their userbase alone is an argument of using their service is horrible since it makes every competition futile…

      •  Miocene   ( @Miocene@beehaw.org ) 
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        131 year ago

        From the perspective of someone in the UK, the ongoing shift in government and society towards openly discriminatory/suppressive policies aimed at some minorities (trans people, certain ethnic/cultural groups) and the accompanying moral panics to that effect make the idea of the state running, monitoring and controlling social media as a utility a bit terrifying - particularly for something so fundamental to modern life.

        A lot of the issues with centralised social media in private hands would just be intensified if the state were directly running the show - it can’t be trusted to act as a benign, responsible steward.

        • No reason the state can’t run their own Mastodon instance. Then they don’t have to moderate anything except the comment sections on their own pages, but everyone can consume the content as they please.

          I live in a region of the US recently effected by a freak natural disaster. The US Army Core of Engineers announced at 2AM last night that they might have to release water from a dam, adding to the floodwaters in an already flooded downtown near me. On Twitter. Which you can’t view unless you create an account, and even then you might get rate limited. That’s not an acceptable availability for a public emergency announcement.

          • Yes, having state-run instances of federated social media would be an excellent way to both legitimize the fediverse and remove some of the control that these mega-corporations have. There’s no reason why privately- or corporate-run instances could not exist alongside these instances, and would still serve to combat potential state or corporate censorship.

        • The logic of what you’re saying is that the executive teams Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg would provide better leadership for the UK than the current people.

          I mean it’s a low bar, but I wouldn’t go that far.

          •  Miocene   ( @Miocene@beehaw.org ) 
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            1 year ago

            I’d say that, honestly. Comfortably so, even - if the large private providers are acting badly, at least there’s the potential of smaller private groups setting up their own.

            Services directly managed by the state tend to require adherence to a government’s political preferences - where something like the idea of social media as a state-owned utility is concerned, the reality of that would inevitably trend in unfortunate directions for minorities that the government has decided to consider a problem.

      • Today I saw that my countries government has started a mastadon instance, which is pretty neat. Previously they’ve used twitter for some communication but they got some flack for that recently.

  • Threads has not yet launched in Europe due to regulatory issues

    LOL no, there are no “regulatory issues”. Meta itself expects Threads to be illegal in the EU. Which is probably correct. And they do not seem to be having a problem with it. Which is fine by me.

  •  araquen   ( @araquen@beehaw.org ) 
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    331 year ago

    I am willing to be corrected, but from what I understand from my online friend (who is Indian (living in the region) and reports on tech with a focus on India, Asia and Southeast Asia), a lot of Threads’ early adoption is entrenchment. For instance, most of India’s IG users migrated to Threads, and that was part of the initial 10 million.

    I just don’t think that we can look at Threads’ adoption rates in the same way as, say, we look at Mastodon or even early Twitter. Threads is built upon an existing base: Instagram. Meta even pre-made your Threads account if you have IG. I mean, technically I have a Threads account, sitting there, in the shadows. I also have an Excite account. And I dug up my MySpace account in a fit of pique (and then remembered why I left MySpace all those years ago). But having something and using something are different.

    That not to say that Threads isn’t going to end up as Meta’s “revenge” just that the adoption is not necessarily because Threads is better, but that the entire social media monetization culture is pre-built through Instagram; and there not only is no barrier to entry, but you can stumble into the Threads “garden” with ease. It’s basically the same model Microsoft used to bootstrap Windows using the pre-installed DOS base. And it will succeed because the outreach mechanisms are already in place.

    That doesn’t change my mind about choosing Mastodon. I have different online handles for different needs. I lost my original IG handle many years ago, so made one using my real name to lurk on IG; so my Threads handle will end up being my real name, and that’s a show stopper for using the platform. My real name social media are “honey pots” to keep nosey companies out of my hair and ways to keep an eye on my squirrelly remnants of a family. I have no desire to post anything on my real name Threads identity.

    •  sculd   ( @sculd@beehaw.org ) 
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      101 year ago

      How is this controversial? If someone locked down replied / set profile as private they have clearly communicated their intent to limit exposure of their posts. It only makes sense to limit such users from interacting with other servers which Meta has no control over. There are lots of compliance issues for a company like Meta when they have to operate in multiple jurisdictions.

    •  pvr   ( @pvr@beehaw.org ) 
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      51 year ago

      Your first point is an “initial limitation”.

      Your second point:" This is presumably due to most fediverse services not yet supporting reply restrictions."

      Not sure why you are using select quotes without giving the full context to make a point that is actually not there.

      • This is not true. Each Instagram account has the ability to log into Threads. But it’s opt-in. If you don’t want to use Threads then don’t sign up for it. Meta is not duplicating Instagram accounts automatically into Threads.

        And yes, you can’t delete your Threads account since it is your Instagram account. Threads is more a feature flag that they turn on/off on your IG account. I agree that they should make it possible to turn that feature off in the future.

        • I think it should be two different accounts all together. Opting-out on Threads should be as easy as opting-in.

          But are you sure about opt-in? I heard people saying that they see users in ‘suggested followings’ section, which have an Instagram account but not a Threads account. But yet listed as suggested on Threads.

          •  pvr   ( @pvr@beehaw.org ) 
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            31 year ago

            I don’t think it should be two accounts because that will break interoperability between Threads and Instagram. But having said that I agree that you should be able to disable/opt-out Threads with your IG account.

            When you first sign up into Threads it will ask you if you want to follow everyone you follow on Instagram. This will allow you to follow people that are already on Threads and it will automatically follow the people that will sign up for Threads later. But you can’t tag people that haven’t signed up for Threads yet. So it’s definitely opt-in but it has a discoverability mechanic built in to make it easier for you to find people + potentially follow people that may sign up in the future.

    •  Limeade   ( @Limeade@beehaw.org ) 
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      101 year ago

      Wouldn’t cumulative user-seconds of screen time per day be plummeting if you can only see 500 tweets per day or whatever that limit was that he rolled out? I’d be doubting any company’s claims of record high viewership at a time when most of their users were reportedly being locked out of the site due to a new policy, even if their metric didn’t have such an oddly specific name.