• The white supremacists are running a campaign to help their elderly (quite a large user base) get digitally literate. You get a free noodling glove and a Substack keychain if you install X and take a 15 minute creative writing course.

  • Ok new plan: convince Elon to buy Meta, or at least Threads, or at least get a position on their board.

    But seriously, I don’t understand people jumping from one proprietary walled garden to the next. My hope is that it’s a natural selection thing, and each time a platform gets cancelled, a small percentage of the user base will hop to the fediverse, until eventually it’s the preferred destination.

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    But as boosts from these early efforts wore off, Threads’ downloads would drop, returning once again to become neck-and-neck with X installs, particularly on iOS, according to data from Appfigures.

    Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Threads had 130 million monthly active users (MAUs) as of the company’s fourth quarter.

    Instagram head Adam Mosseri says the Threads app is doing “remarkably well” in Japan, for instance — a market where Twitter had strong traction.

    As TechCrunch reported last month, X appears to have a Verified bot problem, where a number of blue-checked, paid accounts accidentally revealed their source by replying to X posts with some variation of “I’m sorry, I cannot provide the requested feedback as it goes against OpenAI’s content policy”  — a boilerplate response for the AI.

    As for the decentralized X alternatives, like Mastodon’s official mobile app and the newly public Bluesky, they barely register in the face of this competition, appearing as largely flat lines on the download chart.

    To be fair, Mastodon has a wide third-party app ecosystem, but in total, its network is hovering around 1 million monthly active users at this time, per its own first-party data.


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