Sometime overnight, Threads broke one hundred million users. This was always going to be a possibility – the advantage of an existing login and friends list is so overwhelming that Threads hasn’t even launched in the EU because those advantages open it to stupefyingly huge fines for anticompetitive behavior – but the fact that it has hit 50% of Twitter’s MAU in under a week is significant.
How it is? Well, Threads shows you exactly why I only log into Instagram through a browser rather than using the app: it’s optimized for the same endless streams of meme-tastic shitposting that originally made Facebook unusable, and if your friends don’t post enough, you’re going to just end up in an endless scroll of algorithmic garbage. But that said, being in the gunsights for their misconduct over the last seven years has made them sufficiently gun-shy that the kind of alt-right garbage for which Twitter is currently optimized has not got traction.
Algorithmic pink slime firehose notwithstanding, Threads does have some things that make it less of a hassle than Twitter. No trending topics prevents giving a megaphone to bad stuff, no DMs cuts down on a major vector of harassment, and there seems to be a conscious effort among the user base that it’s going to be different this time. Of course, that means the same sort of middle-of-the-road Minion-inspirational NBC prime time mediocre bullshit in carload lots, but it’s better than outright fascists, racists, and tech bros just riding Elon’s nuts.
And nuts is apparently just what Elon is going, which is a delight to watch. This fool literally proposed a dick-measuring contest with Zuckerberg. I sure hope for her own sake that Linda Yaccorino got paid up front and in cash, and if she didn’t, well, that’s her own goddamn fault. Facebook, currently trading as Meta, is not your friend and is not to be trusted and has no future for me – but as someone wisely said on Threads, “you may not like Godzilla but you need him to fight Mechagodzilla.” Threads only has to be out there long enough to torch Twitter, and then it’s off to Mastodon or Bluesky or wherever.
Because to all accounts, I may be only ten days or so away from possibly getting a Bluesky invite. Despite their slow-crawl invitation system, they’ve still built out a user base comparable to Mastodon’s, and the buzz elsewhere is that non-white and non-tech folk are having a better time there than on the ‘Don (which is not surprising; as I’ve said before, Mastodon was never meant to be a drop-in replacement for Twitter and what it does is not exactly suitable for people who are not running a specialized community of interest). I’m following about a hundred people on Twitter, but only a dozen or so post routinely. Similarly, I’m following 67 on Threads, but only 28 follow me and it’s too soon to see how many people are posting routinely. I don’t have a problem following three times as many people as follow me, as long as those people are putting up stuff I want to read. I actually have just over 200 followed and followers alike on my main Mastodon account, but fewer than half a dozen are people I actually know, and none are sports teams with updates or the fistful of celebs I actually want to keep track of.
The dream scenario at this point, honestly, is a Tapbots app that can feed both federation protocols, and being able to follow the SJ Giants or Greenock Morton on Threads via ActivityPub in a Mastodon account while keeping my friends on Bluesky and still seeing the ones who just settle on Threads and call it a day. It might take a while for all this to come together – I genuinely don’t know that Threads will ever adopt ActivityPub, especially if it can grow to nine figures in a week all by itself and has no obvious way to monetize federation (and the Fediverse does not want them there, plainly) – but after three or four years of “the hottest new social network of the afternoon,” we finally have something exciting happening in the space, and not a moment too soon. Now that ham-faced yarpie son of a bitch climbed up there, it’s a Hell of a lot higher than he thought, ain’t it?