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!”
Maybe an optimistic take: people moving = people realising they can move. Eventually some of them may also realise they can move to a platform that’s not controlled by a shitty corpo.
That’s a good point. Plus they won’t be as embedded in the new place as they won’t have 10+ years of history on it. So moving becomes easier generally
“…and running across the street to an identical building that is infested with rats and cockroaches!”
Still better than Nazis.
LibsofTiktok is approved there, so I’m not so sure. Not overwhelmingly Nazi, but Nazis are welcome as long as they don’t say slurs kind of thing that centrists like.
They may not say the slur, but they encode it.
Exactly, because that’s the line for centrists. Bigoted and hateful statements are perfectly acceptable in cynical corporate “neutral” spaces if they’re framed “politely.” As long as the bad words aren’t used, they’re permitted. Libsoftiktok wants nothing less than the total elimination of certain populations of people and there’s no way in reality that that should be an acceptable topic of political discussion regardless of word choice.
Meta has contributed to genocide, which is worse than I can (currently) say about musk
It’s amazing how people forget these things.
wait what 😅 context?
I love it when people come with receipts.
The Nazis set the fire, and now they’re fleeing along with everyone else.
And hey, I’d rather have them on Threads than in here with us.
Is it?
Probably better to use “out of the frying pan and into the fire”
Cool, fleeing one megacorp run by a huge tool for another megacorp run by a huge tool
At least the promise with Threads is that you can move your account and who you follow to a different Mastodon instance in the future.
Don’t think that meta turning into even more of a global social megacorp that controls everything a lot of people seee and interact with day to day is a good thing tbh.
Most people happily exchange one master for another without thinking much about it
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.
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.
Maybe those are mostly Instagram accounts?
I tried out Threads just to see what the fuss was about. It’s mostly just annoying celebrities.
https://mastodon.social/@taylorlorenz/110693385561252959 Elon really made some metric up to claim twitter is healthy
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.
Linking these to instagram accounts is textbook anti-trust behavior to establish market positions
Not a goddamn thing about this is ‘organic’
I don’t see the problem with it, it just sounds like the logical thing to do. You can log into any Google service with a Google account, so log into an Instagram service with an Instagram account too. You can also already log into Instagram with a Facebook account, so this isn’t even unprecedented within Meta.
I don’t think anybody’s saying there’s anything wrong with using Instagram accounts as the base to access the platform. It’ll become federated soon, so that won’t be a requirement for long.
The issue that some people take, myself included, is that those aren’t really “new” users, so calling it “growth” is disingenuous. They’re already Instagram users. It effectively makes Threads just Instagram+. Not that that’s inherently a bad thing, but it’s not really “organic growth” as Zuck is calling it. There’s nothing to “grow” if the user base already existed in the first place; it’s just the same user base having access to a new feature.
I can see where you’re coming from, but the “growth” they’re tracking doesn’t seem to be the number of Instagram accounts, but the number of accounts that have signed up for Threads. From a business perspective, they’re still growing a new service. Even if these are still the same people who are already using Instagram, they’re increasing their engagement with Instagram’s services and spending more time there. Now those people are using their Instagram account for photo sharing and microblogging instead of switching to Twitter for that, and more engagement means more ad interaction.
Well I guess that’s at least one good thing about Threads
