Rod HiltonHere are two things that are true at the same time.
1. Threads, honestly, kinda sucks.
2. Twitter is fucking done for, lower the casket.
Unless I'm using it wrong (very possible), there is no Home tab that shows you the people you're following. No custom feeds, no lists, no way for your follow graph to have any effect. Following someone, seemingly, does nothing other than boosting their feelgoods.
There's no explore tab, no trending topics, no hashtags. Search only searches accounts.
It's borderline unusable for anything.
And it already has over 2 million signups, lots of big brands, celebs, influencers.
Twitter's fucked.
Woedenaz@rodhilton guessing they rushed it out to capitalize on Twitter's biggest, most recent fuck up.
@rodhilton Looked at your replies and saw you said that's essentially what appears to have happened.
Why do you think they're getting so many sign ups? Is it just marketing and how it's easily tied to Instagram?
@Woedenaz I think it speaks to the general desire to leave Twitter for something that is basically exactly the same, but doesn't have the baggage of other alternatives.
Bluesky's invite-only thing made it too hard to jump. Mastodon has a lot of signup friction and is generally unwelcoming and obnoxious to normies. Post is for journos.
Threads is more palatable for influencer culture types, which makes it the "cool" one.
@rodhilton I can only speak for myself but I haven't really noticed Mastodon being unwelcoming or unfriendly. I suppose I'm not exactly a normie, though.
I do agree that sign-up friction is real, though. That was what kept me from signing up for quite a while.
I suspect, personally, that the ease of signing up is the largest contributor to Threads gaining so many from launch.
NKT@Woedenaz @rodhilton It's true that the signup is awful. You just get warnings and stuff, it's not sensible. And following someone from getting their name, etc is also far too hard unless you can find an actual toot from them, which you can only do if someone already has them followed on your server (unless I'm doing it wrong in the app?)
Not frictionless, at all.
Not frictionless, at all.
Adnan@rodhilton whether threads breaks through or not is going to be decided by how fast their team can iterate. Hashtags, decent search, following only feed, actually being able to type threads-of-threads easily.
Nothing overly complex. But they’ve launched without any of this so they’ll need to race for it.
@kiriappeee this is true though I have to assume that they'll be able to move fast given that all of those features are already implemented in Meta's OTHER social networks.
@rodhilton plus one to that point.
Also, not sure if this is by design, but interesting possible future for threads by holding off on federation at the start.
I imagine a lot of people currently on mastodon based federated networks will try threads out, gain many of their insta followers immediately, and then when federation launches there could be little reason to go back to a smaller instance.
Both pros and cons there but I can definitely see this happening.
Dan Ambrogio@kiriappeee yup. I've signed up and I'm making use of their algorithm to curate a follow list, with the intention of following those accounts here when it opens up
@atypicaloddity their choice to add a follow all button and the mechanism to auto follow when someone joins (and they will because curiosity plus super low friction with Instagram login) was extremely smart from a growth perspective. I don’t like the lack of a following only feed but at the start it’s going to supercharge the feeling of liveness on the network for the casual user. Overall a very clever launch so far.
@kiriappeee yeah, and the focus on algo content over follows ensures that users have new content constantly, making it feel much more active than a fresh Mastodon account
@atypicaloddity also, and @caseynewton did a good write up on this, their also feed is doing a good job of surfacing stuff from who you follow. Been watching it carefully and thought it’s early to say, it looks like it is using my follows list as a way of surfacing a lot of content.
David@rodhilton Since Threads is based off of Instagram, it's not surprising Threads doesn't have it. Cause Instagram doesn't have most of these things either.
@david1 Instagram doesn't have follower feeds or hashtags?
(I've never actually used it)
Jacob Schumer@rodhilton it’s basically TikTok for twitter. Absolutely unusably bad until you’ve trained the algorithm or have enough people to follow.
@jacobschumer your follow don't influence your feed though, at least not yet.
Do you think it's doing TikTok-style autotraining based on what you stay on when scrolling? That's interesting, I had considered that possibility.
Bryan Atinsky@rodhilton Use the Metatext app for Mastadon.
@rodhilton It’s significantly better than Mastadon’s native app.
✅💃Màdiq🙈🙉🙊Iźichi💃✅@rodhilton it's just what happens, it's just hubris to think that what happened to geocities, myspace, friendster, 2nd life, which is what the facemash founder was trying to recreate, etc... will not happen to the next thing that replaced/replaces it.
"Mark my words boy, Mark them well, I have survived your predecessors and I will survive you." - Merovingian
Kevin Whalen 
@rodhilton It certainly has a lot of work to do (Follower timeline, Lists etc..).
WolfH@rodhilton They have said that "followers only" feed is being worked on, plus other features.
But I agree that Twitter is probably done.
Griff@rodhilton Please at least let Twitter stay around until the new CEO fully launches whatever ad scheme she’s going to cook up to attempt to pull it out of the pit. It’s going to be magnificent to watch.
DoubleFelix@rodhilton It is all about the "network effect". There are some cases (like Trump's grievance blog aka "truth social") where people want a klan, not a network. But most people look to systems like Twitter in order to connect broadly.
Musk is doing everything possible to abandon the broad network and to transform Twitter into a megaphone for Musk himself and little else. There are still millions of Twitter users, so it will take a long time for that to dry up. But Musk has not made a single move that will attract more people to Twitter over the long haul. In 2023, daily usage is up slightly, but that is probably due to the welcoming back of the white nationalist crowd.
Meta starts with a large base of potential users, but how many will be active on Threads, especially if Meta isn't going to interoperate with the rest of Mastodon for the time being?
This really doesn't get interesting until Meta hooks up with the rest of Mastodon.
Musk is doing everything possible to abandon the broad network and to transform Twitter into a megaphone for Musk himself and little else. There are still millions of Twitter users, so it will take a long time for that to dry up. But Musk has not made a single move that will attract more people to Twitter over the long haul. In 2023, daily usage is up slightly, but that is probably due to the welcoming back of the white nationalist crowd.
Meta starts with a large base of potential users, but how many will be active on Threads, especially if Meta isn't going to interoperate with the rest of Mastodon for the time being?
This really doesn't get interesting until Meta hooks up with the rest of Mastodon.