Three days later, we’re live. Threads officially launched for public consumption about five hours ago, give or take, and already has over two million users. Clearly it’s easier to get people to sign up for something new when they already have an account and a friends list.
Some thoughts, in no particular order:
* The default timeline when you first sign on is an avalanche of shitposters, clout chasers, and the sort of algorithmic garbage you get when you use the Instagram app. Which is hardly surprising, but the Instagram app has the option to flip to a list of the people you follow. THIS DOES NOT EXIST IN THREADS. There is no way to confine your view to just the people you asked to see, and if you have the misfortune of refreshing your timeline while looking at a post from a friend, it will vanish and be replaced with more pink slime content.
* That, coupled with the fact that you can mute or block someone and still see more of their posts, gives the distinct impression that Threads didn’t ship because it was ready, it shipped because Twitter had a really bad weekend and Bluesky has hit an inflection point on mindshare in the last seven to ten days. It’s not available in the EU, because they can’t clear GDPR, and it’s missing some fairly rudimentary functionality, which suggests that the last six months have basically been “how do we fit the Insta authentication system into the Mastodon code?”
* I mean, maybe? God knows that until Phony Stark rolled up, Mastodon was famous mostly for furries and for having its codebase used to bootstrap far-right websites. What else would you call Facebook? Not to mention…
* By adding a text update posting service to an Instagram app which contains everything else they’ve ripped off in the last decade, the Facebook machine has now produced a laundered New Facebook which is just two or three apps in a trench coat and doesn’t have the stink of your Trump aunt’s racist Minions memes on it. It took forever, but they finally have all the bits in place.
* Here’s the thing: all I want, all I *ever* wanted, was Twitter from 2012 and maybe Instagram from the same time. No Snapchat, no TikTok, no ripping off YouTube, none of that. Right now, based on what I’m hearing, the best shot I have of that is Bluesky. There are already lots of people there I would follow, it doesn’t have a firehouse of algorithmic shit to all accounts, and while it does have that hipster dumb fuck Dorsey on the board, it’s not in hock to a Big Five Or Six tech company and it’s produced at least as viable a product as Mastodon or Threads.
* Is it harsh to be judging a product on its first five hours? Not this product. They’ve had six months and all the resources of Facebook to make this pop off, and it’s being held up as the great challenge to Twitter. So no, it’s not unfair in the least, and miss me with that lil-ol-Clemson bullshit, when you add two million users in the first four hours you better be ready to play in the big leagues.
* As of the end of last year, Twitter had somewhere under 400 million users, and Instagram had three times that. Insta’s MAU is quadruple Twitter’s, and that was before the assorted shenanigans by which Donald Frunk has chosen to sandbag his investment over the past six months (capped by this weekend’s rate limiting). It will not take very much at all for Threads to be a viable alternative to Twitter for a whole lot of people, because if your friends go, there’s no reason not to.
* There is a scenario whereby Threads replaces Twitter, but thanks to ActivityPub, I can base myself in my Mastodon account and still follow the people I want to follow (and the entities like the SJ Giants or Greenock Morton who are statistically unlikely to ever show up on Mastodon). That would be a very agreeable state of affairs for me personally, but it would require Facebook to commit to building out ActivityPub support in Threads, which (surprise surprise) did not make the 1.0 release. I guess we’ll see what happens.
* Musk is Trump, but Zuckerberg is George W. Bush: it’s his damn fault we got to this point in the first place. I have no problem leveraging the lesser of two evils, but I thrill to the prospect of being able to kick them both to the curb for good.