Twitter had verification based on the account's noteworthiness, and now it doesn't. That was one of the main features of Twitter, and now Threads.net has it.
Twitter did before, based on their own internal criteria. The system was flawed, but having a flawed system is better than no system at all, as we are seeing now.
Threads copies verification from Instagram which is mostly celebrities, public figures, brands, etc. You may not agree with the choices of noteworthiness, but they are at least checked for validity. https://help.instagram.com/854227311295302
Twitter has verification which is "anyone with spare change who wants to shout louder than others".
You can pay for verification on Instagram as well. I had a blue checkmark last month when I kind of just paid for fun to see if it would increase engagement (I'm not an influencer or popular in the least, just have a few hundred followers). So I'd say Instagram/Threads' verification is equally worthless.
The way Twitter verification used to work and why was of any value to other users was that, if your twitter name was, idk, the name of an important politician or company, the blue checkmark meant that someone at twitter took some amount of care to check that you're actually that politician or company. Like, "verified" meant that twitter verfied their identity, tying the twitter account to some sort of external credentials. You used to know that you're talking to the actual company support team or whatever.
Now it just means someone paid some amount of money. They're "verified" in the sense of like verifying the email address you used to sign up with to an olde timey web forum, and maybe that you're probably not an absolutely minimum effort spam/scam bot. However the "verified" checkmark is still basically useless because it doesn't verify an identity or credentials anymore, and it's easy enough for bad actors to get the checkmark to then impersonate some brand or website or whatever, and have their posts get privileged by The Algorithm.
So, previously "verified" status was useful for people to be able to tell that the posts they're reading are really from who they think they're from. Now, "verified" status means that bad actors and bad posters get their posts boosted ahead of normal posts, so the replies to any mildly popular thread are going to be full of attempted scams and tepid takes. It's become completely useless for its original purpose and makes content discovery worse.
I've never used Instagram, but I noticed all of the blue checks on Threads were famous people. Pay-to-play verification would kind of ruin it. Meta could have really built on their advantage over Twitter's blunders.
IG verification still requires validating your government ID matching your account name/bio, no? Twitter is just "do you have a working credit card #"?
This is one of the bullet points; no clue how strictly they enforce it:
• Notable: Your account must represent a well-known, highly searched for person, brand or entity. We review accounts that are featured in multiple news sources, and we don't consider paid or sponsored media content as sources for review.
Not having a news feed with just people I follow makes it near unusable. At the moment there is just too much garbage content from "influencers" cluttering the app, and very little you can do to curate it.
Unrelated. But this web interface is weird. There is no UI outside of the content except for their icon at the top. When you click it, instead of taking you to a home view, it toggles dark mode (!) If you go to https://www.threads.net you only get one button instructing you to get the app.
They said it coming soon, but the more you follow people the more your feed becomes filled with posts and replies from the people you follow. It's not as bad as when you first join.
110 Mb so far. In just a few months, HN will be full of comments praising the original version of the app for being so much snappier compared to whatever they have then.
That feels oddly low. It was released at 5ish PM PST on a Wednesday, and considering they have literally all of Instagram + Facebook's userbase to push it on, it seems pretty low. The "sign up" was also just a "log in with FB/Instagram" button where the form was already auto-filled. So it's not like people had to convert, it's pretty much about as pure a product-market-fit test you can get.
Discoverability is also pretty awful with a ton of cringe "influencer content" polluting my main feed. I don't want to necessarily block MrBeast, I just don't want to see him when I don't follow him.
In any case, my prediction is that this experiment is going to be comparable to when they tried to copy Snapchat's story feature or when reels were meant to replace TikTok. These were nice cute distractions, but didn't materially impact Snapchat's business or TikTok's popularity. And in spite of their blunders, I think Twitter is here to stay.
I opened it and immediately saw a post from GaryVee.
Who was sanctimoniously instructing people to 'collectively be more civil'.
Not a platform I want to use, but the App seemed decent; smooth UI animations, clean interface, simple onboarding with an overall decent UX.
I think Instagram people who are Twitter curious will jump on it.
If they can get Celeb style Tweets and memes without having to interact with the Garbage Fire that is Twitter, then I think it's going to be a nice easy win for Meta.
Not a raging multi-billion dollar success like Instagram, but an OK casual slow burn that offers value to Instagram users.
My Twitter is full of two things - people doing exactly the same thing they were doing a year, two years, three years ago, and people saying how Twitter is such a dumpster fire now and everything is so bad and it's the end and Twitter will be dead soon (but they're still on it).
I'm not saying Twitter is going to be around 20 years from now, but I do think the reports of its death are greatly exaggerated.
A game I play held a retweeting campaign[1] (common thing for games) yesterday, and it successfully passed their usual threshold (70k retweets) like any other time they held one.
That was indication to me that claims of Twitter's death are, indeed, greatly exaggerated as always.
I don't doubt some people are getting rate limited, but I also have no doubt now that those people are the vocal minority while everyone else keeps on tweeting.
Marketers and influencers have a lot of pull, though. Journalists might follow if that's where the money is. When the journalists leave Twitter, it's over. Though personally I think Twitter was done once they got rid of verification.
Yep I agree, if journalists move towards it and start sharing news, scoops, etc. then stick a fork in Twitter it's done. Twitter will just be an app to go scream your racists screeds or whatever while Elon posts doge memes and insults people that point out all the racism happening.
Lots of room for improvement like no multi account support, as you mentioned discoverability, and feed options.
I downloaded it directly from the App Store because I’ve heard about it through external channels. Are they somehow notifying users to check Threads via their other apps (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp)?
> Are they somehow notifying users to check Threads via their other apps (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp)?
Yep, at least on Instagram, there's a "follow me on Threads" sticker you can add to your stories. (I rarely check FB these days, but there's probably something on there too.)
2 million users in 2 hours is incomparable to any social network growth rate I've seen.
Where as the entire Fediverse has 11 million registered users in 7 years.
I don't know how that 2M in 2 hours is 'oddly low' but at that rate, Threads will surpass the entire Fediverse in less than 24 hours and will be centralizing the Fediverse when it turns on ActivityPub.
Firefox, a desktop app in the era of desktop apps when the entire Internet was like 2 billion people got 8 million full downloads in a single day. That was about 15 years ago. FB/Insta/Meta getting about that, or certainly less than an order of magnitude more, is kind of joke, IMO.
Consider: these are the engagement numbers for the now-defunct Google Plus.
In 2011, Google+ had 10 million users two weeks after the launch.[14] In a month, it had 25 million.[15] In October 2011, the service had 40 million users, according to Larry Page.[16] At the end of 2011, Google+ had 90 million users.[17] In October 2013, approximately 540 million monthly active users used the social layer by interacting with Google+'s enhanced properties, such as Gmail, the +1 button, and YouTube comments.[18] Some 300 million monthly active users participated in the social network by interacting with the Google+ social-networking stream. According to ComScore, the biggest market was the United States followed by India.
It needs time to tell - not a lot of time, but more than a few hours. Lots of people sign up to park an account on new services and Threads is going to be one of the most heavily-parked of them all.
It's DAU/MAU numbers and retention that make the bigger difference. ActivityPub has had pretty good retention since the early era of Mastodon - not gangbusters growth, but enough for people to feel comfortable with the ecosystem as it stands and uninfluenced by a large instance.
AP's "core experience" is more like a combo of Usenet, web forums and email than XMPP or Twitter - it can be aggregated and surveilled, but the social graph isn't solely in messaging and follower connections, it's in space-making and exclusivity. While individual users can be coerced into centralizing, spaces are a much harder nut and are why little PhpBB forums persist even now. You can have all the users but not the spaces, and if you don't play nice with the spaces, adios.
> I don't want to necessarily block MrBeast, I just don't want to see him when I don't follow him.
I suspect Facebook are, at this point, culturally incapable of allowing you to just see what you've set to follow. As in, that four-panel gag meme that ends with someone being thrown out a window incapable.
Haha, normally I'd agree. And, I think that's one of the reasons no big company put any real effort (that I'm aware of / can think of at the moment) into trying to create and deploy a twitter-like service.
The "Musko-cringian" empire is an unbelievably ridiculous gift, here. Some of the timing couldn't be better.
Now, even with that backdrop, it's quite likely "Threads" (ugh, ... marketroids) won't take off like wildfire. But, I think we're at something of a fork here. Either this will be the competition current incarnation Twitter needs to start turning things around, or Threads will capitalize on each future misstep, service outage / problem, etc.
Threads has a sort of balanced position, in terms of marketing / uptake. Absolutely not the multi-faceted "cachet" of Bluesky Social, rather, the opposite ... arguably even "less cool" than Twitter (was) ... But, it also has the low friction user sign on you mention, part of an ecosystem incredibly widely used (a winning formula in America, especially, is convenience - about the best marketing available, itself), plenty of technical heft behind it, etc.
It could easily displace Twitter, and I think more quickly than many might argue.
>Discoverability is also pretty awful with a ton of cringe influencer content polluting my main feed
Give them some slack. Twitter wasn't fully polished two hours after initial release. You need to give them some time to fine tune their algos and come up with new features. My bet is they will soon develop an explore page similar to Twitter's, and will give users options to tailor their home feed.
I think yours is a very critical take for a company that pushed out an MVP two hours ago.
If you don't want to see then you have to block, this is the nature of social media and influencers.
I don't have a social media account, unless you include here. I certainly edited my browser scripts so I don't see many of the what I consider obnoxious influencers.
It's not that I disagree with the speculation, but none of it is backed up. User stats as well as revenue are private. When you put out a strong statement like "revenue is collapsing" you deliver it as fact, whilst it's guess work.
While i agree with you on principle... i hope it's worse than HN lol. If not, i need to get rid of HN because of all the horrible behavior Facebook and Co have fostered in their community for the sake of engagement.
Especially another facebook app. Those in the category of "app only heavy social media consumers" have been addicted to tiktok for too long already. Any offering less than that by the place they left is not good enough.
And those like myself who are no longer interested in the current iteration of social apps do not need another offering from this iteration of social apps.
Yep, that was the turn-off for me too. I only use Twitter and Facebook in a browser, even on mobile—I noticed serious battery life improvements upon uninstalling the Facebook app in particular.
Odd UI on mobile. Can’t navigate to the homepage. The logo toggles darkmode. When I went directly to threads.net the only content is a link to the app store. No way for a web user to browse content.
So far it kind of sucks, scrolls really clunky and my feed is 100% people i don’t follow since there’s so few people posting this early. I imagine that may improve but up until this week I was a heavy twitter used and I won’t spend 5 minutes on this terrible “curated” feed.
With all the privacy invasive things that Threads tracks people with on its app, this is still proof that network effects trump privacy any day when it comes to social networks.
Privacy as a feature that Mastodon touts is simply and clearly not enough to sway normal users to use it, after many Twitter fuck ups by Elon and over 6 years of Mastodon's existence.
No it didn't. It got to 5 million downloads in 5 days[0] (and that's downloads, not sign-ups), and took a few months to break 10 million downloads. Threads got that many sign-ups in 4 hours[1], and I assume we'll see the 10 million mark this week.
Tried it, FF with NoScript, Disconnect and uBlock and that didn't work even if given site permissions for NoScript. (Didn't seem to be able to debug it quickly.)
.net domains aren't all that valuable. Funny enough threads.com seems to be a random Slack clone which will probably get acquired by Meta down the line for their domain name.
I'd be surprised if it was more than $20k. Maybe in the $3-10k range? Seems to be the going rate. .Nets usually aren't that valuable, but I suppose if you have the network of Meta you can _make_ anything valuable.
Idk, if they need something quick, og owner might have said a price they thought was way to high, and FB just said, "yea ok". I'd prob put it in the 50-100k range, but wouldnt be suprised to see 500k-1m
someone replied and delete while i was typing: here is my thoughts...
Well i guess we will see. I think threads.net works in multiple ways, and the .net stigma doesnt matter anymore with so many TLDs, and kinda makes sense for social app.
I know someone that sold a .io for a ridonculous sum. And again I think if fb/meta wants to do something they are in a place to make an offer the holder wont refuse.
It’s really strange, and awesome, to see them launch on a .net domain. I have a decent (8 letter) .com with the .net and others to match. I want to build something on the .net, so I hope this builds some awareness for the TLD.
I would love to hear an explanation of why they chose a .net. I always think of it as an OG TLD that throws back to a time when the internet didn’t suck, but I doubt that’s it. Lol.
It was. But Facebook is worth billions. I’m pretty sure they could afford it. I have no idea why a company with their money and power go with a .net because the .com was taken by some random site.
Some people have been theorizing that Facebook will sue them to get the .com. Apparently, Facebook has been using the Threads name before the current owners of the .com, but I don’t know if this is true.
.net is almost as valuable as .com right now, and that additional value .com has is dropping over time.
Search Engines don't care and people have normalized the extended TLD space since the 2010s, since URLs in general are just scary to non-technical people anyway. Even with an aging (on average) population, we will have all grown up with this mindset.
^thread.net (not threads.net) was a webhost with cheap shared hosting for PHP, Perl, etc in the late 1990s
When was the name announced/leaked? They would have tried to acquire relevant domains beforehand, like the guy who owned meta.com (.co? .net?) and didn't even know it was Facebook wanting to buy it off him.
iirc he got a pretty good price, but nothing like if he'd known who the buyer was.
Let's see, FB has about 2 billion daily actives, Insta has like 3 to 4 billion? Assume half of them are sleeping there should still be a couple billion Meta user online about now and only 2 million of them so far have downloaded it?
We got 8 million downloads (not updates, full downloads) in one day back in the desktop era when there were only a couple billion people online in total.
This feels pretty weak to me. I wonder if that's intentional, get the enthusiasts on first, for free, as it were, then turn on the firehose later on to get the "olds" over from FB and the "influencers" over from Insta?
Are there large banners or advertisements on Instagram or Facebook pushing people to use Threads? (I’m on neither.) A few more things that might affect signup numbers: Threads requires an app to use, and it’s not available in the EU yet. Also the announced go-live was tomorrow.
> Let's see, FB has about 2 billion daily actives, Insta has like 3 to 4 billion?
I agree that 2M "signups" is not actually impressive, but I'm not sure where you're getting the figure of 3-4 billion DAUs for Instagram. Everything I'm seeing is significantly lower than that.
Yeah. That was wildly off. ChatGPT strikes again, or rather my ability to get chatGPT to give me useful information strikes again. Seems like closer to 1 billion or less?
I wonder if I was getting all Meta users or something. Well, doesn't matter too much in the end. FB has billions of users and a few million upsold to the new free app isn't terribly impressive to me.
Amazing naming, still. Searching on the Android Play Store, just in case, first thing that comes up is "Threads" -- that has to put in an all capitals discalimer:
> [NOT AFFILIATED W/ THREADS BY INSTAGRAM] All in-one team communication platform
I bet they had a bump due to the name clash, and loads of support request too!
First impressions of the app are that it’s a bit slow and need some work.
Some taps take several seconds to complete or just fail without feedback. But I guess that’s just server load that will even out and be designed around.
Scrolling is not as fluid as either FB or IG, which is surprising given how much Meta invest in their feed. But better than most mastodon apps I’ve tried.
Interface is pretty minimal and pleasant. Navigation is very intuitive.
I like that I can import all my Instagram data but still keep it separate. I used Twitter and Instagram to primarily follow artists , and so the connection is nice.
I appreciate that they allow keeping it separate if needed.
I’m also interested to see what their fediverse integration will be like.
Feed content feels less chaotic than Twitter with more priority towards accounts I follow and less advertising noise. It feels like Twitter from a few years ago which is what I want.
Overall I am interested to see how this evolves. I’m not a fan of meta but I think this is right in their wheelhouse. I miss Twitter for the wealth of knowledge and culture that one could find on there if you curated your circles.(emphasis on curation). Elon ruined curation and I hope Threads does it better.
all those FB engineers that have designed twitter in an interview thousands of times and they cannot get this to be fast out of the gate? guess actually building a system is different than a power trip in an interview
seeing that freaks face made me physically shudder. If they were smart they would distance this product from him as much as possible. it should be painfully obvious that he is toxic for this and any brand.
pay him whatever, let him stay in charge, but please for the love of god STOP PUTTING him as the face of anything.
I dunno, he's kinda growing on me. If people can like Elon, why can't they like the Zuck? Zuck is clearly more level headed than Elon, which to me makes him more likeable. Embracing the zuck monikor was a real power move, given that up until this point most people use that name in a disparaging manner :D
How is threads going to be different from Instagram? The tools available for content creators will be different but if I am just browsing they should be similar, no?
It's more text-oriented than photo-oriented, and it follows the Twitter convention of replies being the same "class" in the feed, rather than the Insta/FB convention of them being a small hierarchy off of the original post.
355 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadTwitter has verification which is "anyone with spare change who wants to shout louder than others".
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64697560
Now it just means someone paid some amount of money. They're "verified" in the sense of like verifying the email address you used to sign up with to an olde timey web forum, and maybe that you're probably not an absolutely minimum effort spam/scam bot. However the "verified" checkmark is still basically useless because it doesn't verify an identity or credentials anymore, and it's easy enough for bad actors to get the checkmark to then impersonate some brand or website or whatever, and have their posts get privileged by The Algorithm.
So, previously "verified" status was useful for people to be able to tell that the posts they're reading are really from who they think they're from. Now, "verified" status means that bad actors and bad posters get their posts boosted ahead of normal posts, so the replies to any mildly popular thread are going to be full of attempted scams and tepid takes. It's become completely useless for its original purpose and makes content discovery worse.
Depends on what you mean by "meaningful". Threads uses Instagram's verification, which, like Twitter's, is now pay-to-play[0].
[0] https://about.fb.com/news/2023/02/testing-meta-verified-to-h...
• Notable: Your account must represent a well-known, highly searched for person, brand or entity. We review accounts that are featured in multiple news sources, and we don't consider paid or sponsored media content as sources for review.
Is there any way to use this without the app?
Discoverability is also pretty awful with a ton of cringe "influencer content" polluting my main feed. I don't want to necessarily block MrBeast, I just don't want to see him when I don't follow him.
In any case, my prediction is that this experiment is going to be comparable to when they tried to copy Snapchat's story feature or when reels were meant to replace TikTok. These were nice cute distractions, but didn't materially impact Snapchat's business or TikTok's popularity. And in spite of their blunders, I think Twitter is here to stay.
I learned about the trick to search for "saymore" from a family member and see the red invite button on the search bar. She learned from some random.
Who was sanctimoniously instructing people to 'collectively be more civil'.
Not a platform I want to use, but the App seemed decent; smooth UI animations, clean interface, simple onboarding with an overall decent UX.
I think Instagram people who are Twitter curious will jump on it.
If they can get Celeb style Tweets and memes without having to interact with the Garbage Fire that is Twitter, then I think it's going to be a nice easy win for Meta.
Not a raging multi-billion dollar success like Instagram, but an OK casual slow burn that offers value to Instagram users.
I'm not saying Twitter is going to be around 20 years from now, but I do think the reports of its death are greatly exaggerated.
That was indication to me that claims of Twitter's death are, indeed, greatly exaggerated as always.
I don't doubt some people are getting rate limited, but I also have no doubt now that those people are the vocal minority while everyone else keeps on tweeting.
[1]: https://twitter.com/fgoproject/status/1676426390625812481
Web mobile UI is horrible though.*
* It doesn’t exist. Just a page to telling you to get the app. >.>
I downloaded it directly from the App Store because I’ve heard about it through external channels. Are they somehow notifying users to check Threads via their other apps (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp)?
Yep, at least on Instagram, there's a "follow me on Threads" sticker you can add to your stories. (I rarely check FB these days, but there's probably something on there too.)
I suspect the surprise release today is to manage server load / "soft" launch. Wait until tomorrow for the real metrics.
Where as the entire Fediverse has 11 million registered users in 7 years.
I don't know how that 2M in 2 hours is 'oddly low' but at that rate, Threads will surpass the entire Fediverse in less than 24 hours and will be centralizing the Fediverse when it turns on ActivityPub.
False. 2 billion people weren't using the internet 15 years ago. [0]
10 million users in 7 hours already surpasses that [1] Firefox statistic. The rapid growth of Threads is no joke.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/273018/number-of-interne...
[1] https://www.threads.net/t/CuWGPjwrfq9
In 2011, Google+ had 10 million users two weeks after the launch.[14] In a month, it had 25 million.[15] In October 2011, the service had 40 million users, according to Larry Page.[16] At the end of 2011, Google+ had 90 million users.[17] In October 2013, approximately 540 million monthly active users used the social layer by interacting with Google+'s enhanced properties, such as Gmail, the +1 button, and YouTube comments.[18] Some 300 million monthly active users participated in the social network by interacting with the Google+ social-networking stream. According to ComScore, the biggest market was the United States followed by India.
It's DAU/MAU numbers and retention that make the bigger difference. ActivityPub has had pretty good retention since the early era of Mastodon - not gangbusters growth, but enough for people to feel comfortable with the ecosystem as it stands and uninfluenced by a large instance.
AP's "core experience" is more like a combo of Usenet, web forums and email than XMPP or Twitter - it can be aggregated and surveilled, but the social graph isn't solely in messaging and follower connections, it's in space-making and exclusivity. While individual users can be coerced into centralizing, spaces are a much harder nut and are why little PhpBB forums persist even now. You can have all the users but not the spaces, and if you don't play nice with the spaces, adios.
I suspect Facebook are, at this point, culturally incapable of allowing you to just see what you've set to follow. As in, that four-panel gag meme that ends with someone being thrown out a window incapable.
The "Musko-cringian" empire is an unbelievably ridiculous gift, here. Some of the timing couldn't be better.
Now, even with that backdrop, it's quite likely "Threads" (ugh, ... marketroids) won't take off like wildfire. But, I think we're at something of a fork here. Either this will be the competition current incarnation Twitter needs to start turning things around, or Threads will capitalize on each future misstep, service outage / problem, etc.
Threads has a sort of balanced position, in terms of marketing / uptake. Absolutely not the multi-faceted "cachet" of Bluesky Social, rather, the opposite ... arguably even "less cool" than Twitter (was) ... But, it also has the low friction user sign on you mention, part of an ecosystem incredibly widely used (a winning formula in America, especially, is convenience - about the best marketing available, itself), plenty of technical heft behind it, etc.
It could easily displace Twitter, and I think more quickly than many might argue.
Give them some slack. Twitter wasn't fully polished two hours after initial release. You need to give them some time to fine tune their algos and come up with new features. My bet is they will soon develop an explore page similar to Twitter's, and will give users options to tailor their home feed.
I think yours is a very critical take for a company that pushed out an MVP two hours ago.
Is there a mute feature like on Twitter? I use that all the time.
They haven’t even gotten to the “push” part yet and they’re now over 4 million users.
I don't have a social media account, unless you include here. I certainly edited my browser scripts so I don't see many of the what I consider obnoxious influencers.
Twitter has maybe six months but certainly not twelve before going bankrupt. It's done for. I fully agree with the analysis at https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-slow-sad-death-of-twitt...
It's not that I disagree with the speculation, but none of it is backed up. User stats as well as revenue are private. When you put out a strong statement like "revenue is collapsing" you deliver it as fact, whilst it's guess work.
I'd link to it but it's behind a paywall.
The website seems to be crumbling a bit, everything redirects to get the app. Hope they can scale up a few instances so browsing returns.
I figured I'd maybe take a look, but I won't install on my phone anyways. And I barely use my phone. So that's that.
I check HN on my Librem 5
And those like myself who are no longer interested in the current iteration of social apps do not need another offering from this iteration of social apps.
With all the privacy invasive things that Threads tracks people with on its app, this is still proof that network effects trump privacy any day when it comes to social networks.
Privacy as a feature that Mastodon touts is simply and clearly not enough to sway normal users to use it, after many Twitter fuck ups by Elon and over 6 years of Mastodon's existence.
According to https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount there are about 13m mastodon accounts across all instances.
Threads might pass this by the time I wake up.
[0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2016/11/29/google-allo-hit-5-m...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/over-2-million-signups-2-hou...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/6/23785630/instagrams-thread...
If Firefox strict mode blocks something, I generally accept that as a net good thing.
Well i guess we will see. I think threads.net works in multiple ways, and the .net stigma doesnt matter anymore with so many TLDs, and kinda makes sense for social app.
I know someone that sold a .io for a ridonculous sum. And again I think if fb/meta wants to do something they are in a place to make an offer the holder wont refuse.
I would love to hear an explanation of why they chose a .net. I always think of it as an OG TLD that throws back to a time when the internet didn’t suck, but I doubt that’s it. Lol.
It can’t be a cost thing, can it?
Some people have been theorizing that Facebook will sue them to get the .com. Apparently, Facebook has been using the Threads name before the current owners of the .com, but I don’t know if this is true.
.net is almost as valuable as .com right now, and that additional value .com has is dropping over time.
Search Engines don't care and people have normalized the extended TLD space since the 2010s, since URLs in general are just scary to non-technical people anyway. Even with an aging (on average) population, we will have all grown up with this mindset.
^thread.net (not threads.net) was a webhost with cheap shared hosting for PHP, Perl, etc in the late 1990s
iirc he got a pretty good price, but nothing like if he'd known who the buyer was.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/17/instagram-will-shut-down-i...
From WayBack, it looks like they bought the domain in 2010:
https://web.archive.org/web/20191001000000*/http://threads.n...
We got 8 million downloads (not updates, full downloads) in one day back in the desktop era when there were only a couple billion people online in total.
This feels pretty weak to me. I wonder if that's intentional, get the enthusiasts on first, for free, as it were, then turn on the firehose later on to get the "olds" over from FB and the "influencers" over from Insta?
I agree that 2M "signups" is not actually impressive, but I'm not sure where you're getting the figure of 3-4 billion DAUs for Instagram. Everything I'm seeing is significantly lower than that.
[0] - https://backlinko.com/instagram-users
> [NOT AFFILIATED W/ THREADS BY INSTAGRAM] All in-one team communication platform
I bet they had a bump due to the name clash, and loads of support request too!
The problem with videos (compare to blog writing) is i can't just fast read the whole content first. I need to second by second go to it.
And due to current target of Threads same as Tiktoker (instagram user = tiktok user) ? I can't use it, too.
But for entertaining purpose, short videos is fine.
Some taps take several seconds to complete or just fail without feedback. But I guess that’s just server load that will even out and be designed around.
Scrolling is not as fluid as either FB or IG, which is surprising given how much Meta invest in their feed. But better than most mastodon apps I’ve tried.
Interface is pretty minimal and pleasant. Navigation is very intuitive.
I like that I can import all my Instagram data but still keep it separate. I used Twitter and Instagram to primarily follow artists , and so the connection is nice.
I appreciate that they allow keeping it separate if needed.
I’m also interested to see what their fediverse integration will be like.
Feed content feels less chaotic than Twitter with more priority towards accounts I follow and less advertising noise. It feels like Twitter from a few years ago which is what I want.
Overall I am interested to see how this evolves. I’m not a fan of meta but I think this is right in their wheelhouse. I miss Twitter for the wealth of knowledge and culture that one could find on there if you curated your circles.(emphasis on curation). Elon ruined curation and I hope Threads does it better.
Agreed, but I don’t see any ads yet. Guessing they’re coming soon.
seeing that freaks face made me physically shudder. If they were smart they would distance this product from him as much as possible. it should be painfully obvious that he is toxic for this and any brand.
pay him whatever, let him stay in charge, but please for the love of god STOP PUTTING him as the face of anything.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=SVyLlFezj2E
The list of people you follow is also different (important).
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-thr...