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.
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.
And as we all know, big corporations always keep their promises.
Yeah, I bought a bridge on pre-order 🙂
Pffft, bridge! Just you wait till that guy I met at the pub delivers the friggin’ EIFFEL TOWER to my house in s months time! Only cost me a pint! 😁👌🗼
I’m all for shitting on big corporations but the fact that they wanted to create a platform based on activitypub is interesting.
Adam Mosseri seems to have good intentions with Threads (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hard-fork/id1528594034?i=1000619512224). But Zuck/Meta is most likely going to derail that at some point.
I honestly don’t care for Threads in the long run. My only hope is to follow some people on Threads from a different Mastodon instance. Whatever else they want to do, I don’t care about.
People should be skeptical but competition to Twitter is good. And even better if that product is built on the Fediverse.
I got a fiver that they’ll implement “ActivityPub” in a way that breaks things.
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.
Threads != Facebook
If you don’t want to follow people that are on threads more power to you. That’s the beauty of activitypub.
I know they said they’ll federate with ActivityPub, but did they say they will allow you to move accounts to other instances? That seems extremely unlikely to happen
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.