This is very obviously v0.9
Some fairly fundamental things are missing. Support for ActivityPub, which would allow you to follow Threads users from Mastodon, isn’t there yet. There’s no web interface, which means the only way to post from the desktop is to use the Android app running on the Windows Android Subsystem (I presume it works with ChromeOS’ equivalent). You can’t run the iOS app on Apple Silicon Macs, either.
Most egregious for an app which is spun out of an image platform, there’s support for alt text. This should have been there from the start, no excuses.
It feels like it’s really 2-3 weeks away from launch, but Meta obviously saw a window of opportunity thanks to the last few days chaos on Twitter and decided to push the big red button.
I’m not seeing much to worry Mastodon users
Having seen it and read what Eugen has to say I don’t think the sky is falling in for Mastodon. It will be cool to be able to follow people who exist in a Threads world from my Mastodon account. I’ll have the advantage too of a straightforward chronological feed. Which leads me to…
The feed was a mess at the start, but it got better fast
The feed is clearly algorithmic (and I would say that it really needs a chronological option). There were a lot of complaints about the number of posts from people you didn’t follow in the feed from very early adopters.
Break it down, though, and that’s entirely to be expected. You might follow lots of people but early on they may not even have actually been registered – it effectively flagged anyone you followed on Instagram so that when they registered for Threads, you followed them. And of the people who created accounts, many didn’t post much to start.
So Meta did what Meta does: it gave you something fresh to look at, every time you refreshed your feed or opened the app. Hence, lots of posts from people you don’t follow that the algorithm thought you might be interested in, based on almost no data.
At first my feed was horrible. It’s now fine, and unless I do some doom refreshing all I see is people I follow. If you judged it from the first ten seconds you saw your feed, you really should calm down a little.
Twitter is dead, dead, dead
Within 24 hours on Threads you can find most politicians, media brands, celebrities and sports teams. A lot of what made Twitter good for the kind of ordinary person was being able to connect to and talk about that things – and Twitter was the only platform you could do that, other than Instagram. Now you can connect with all the same people, with text posts.
Less than 24 hours in, Threads has 30m users – it could eclipse Twitter’s scale in a month or too. There is just no reason for Twitter to exist now. It’s just Gab with a couple of hundred million dormant accounts.
There are some serious tests of moderation capabilities ahead
Which leads us nicely on to moderation, and there are many tests of the skills of Meta’s moderation teams and policies to come. Already, some of the most horrible abusive accounts like LibsOfTikTok are on the platform. Is Meta going to ban them when they start spewing hatred and encouraging violence? Zuckerberg has spoken about Threads being a “kind” platform. If he really means that, they are going to have to come down on accounts like LibsOfTikTok hard and fast. We shall see.
The future for Bluesky is not that bright
Unfortunately we can probably consign the likes of T2 and Post to the “where are they now?” file of 2024. Which leaves Bluesky, which recently opened up invites and got quite a few more people in. It had also been pretty vibrant last weekend, when Twitter was melting down – I think that was the last straw for quite a few people.
I think Bluesky is dead. It has some nice technical ideas – shared blocklists, feeds you can programme yourself – but the whole idea of building this on a new, alternative protocol rather than using ActivityPub has meant it’s been trying to tap-dance and unicycle at the same time. It’s been too much, it’s slowed down its ability to scale up, and it probably means it’s missed its window. Those two technical sweeties are outweighed by the fact that most people I know are already on Threads, and I don’t have to search for them.
I quite like it
I wasn’t expecting to like Threads, but I do – or rather I like being connected to friends, old colleagues and family on a text-based social network. I like being able to follow the odd team, celeb, brand or politician.
I don’t hate the algorithm, although I would prefer to be able to default to reverse chronological. When ActivityPub support arrives, I’ll probably just follow a bunch of people on Threads from my Mastodon account, so I get to use a reverse chronological feed and use the powerful filters you have there.
There’s a lot for Meta to do to make it really work, but it’s a good solid start.
