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.

@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.