this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Since it already worked with instagram, this was people signing in with their instagram account, checking the app once or twice, and then going back to instagram. The starting numbers where incredibly manipulated because of this single account system between threads and instagram.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

I saw a lot of people excited to try it. Losing 80% of its peak users at this point doesn't seem like a failure to me. Anybody who was curious was counted as a user. I'm sure fediverse sites have had similar, smaller influxes of new users that create an account to check it out and then don't come back. It takes some determination to move to another social networking ecosystem.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Good I love to see Facebook projects fail

[–] [email protected] 39 points 11 months ago

It's a worse Mastodon, run by a company that celebrated election misinformation, leading to the storming of the Capitol, and who later helped police arrest a woman for abortion by turning over private messages she sent to another party. I hope it fails.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

That's good news. First it was 50% and now 80%. How bout meta loses 100% of its users.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I'd still rather see Threads succeed and Twitter die now that a fash-friendly owner lets fashy types run wild.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago

Meta plays at least as large a part in radicalizing the boomers towards fascism via Facebook

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yep, if Threads can accelerate the death of - ugh - X, it will have served its purpose.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I mean if you pay attention most social media inundated with influencers and companies is basically:

"Buy this, no buy this, buy this instead, spend your money here!" It even leeches into everyday conversations outside of social media.

Pay attention to how often people talk about buying things and newly released products. Hell, I've caught myself contributing to it. It's kind of gross when you realize how steeped in consumerism nearly everything has become.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Who are they even selling to? Everybody's broke.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (2 children)

damn, reading the data collected from the Play Store made me finally delete my instagram account. the damn app is a free farm of data. fuck zuck

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Not sure why anyone wanted a second twitter that’s still made by a big-tech

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I don't understand why someone would choose threads over mastadon, where they could have all the dunking with none of the enshittening.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (3 children)

It's still too complicated for the layperson to have to navigate. Anything beyond "I have one login at one site that everyone else has" is too much for most.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Nobody chose threads. It just got shoved down their throats.

Also, Mastadon doesn't have the same marketing these companies do.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

I'd be keen to give it a go if it were legitimately anyone else besides Facebook. Would have even tried it if Microsoft made a random Twitter clone

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago

A lot of people tried it out the first few days. Didn't found the function they need and left.

Probably a lot will go back if its fully functional. Honestly cannot believe a Twitter alternative did not launch with chronological feed....

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

Ive been hearing the same headline for two weeks now

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (2 children)

This is what happens when you launch with no content discovery features, so you have to whore yourself out and follow anyone and everyone if you want to get any attention. "Content creators" and clout chasers are the primary customer of this service, so without that I don't know why they'd want to use it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

"Minimum Viable Product" has been a curse on the industry for so long. This is the clearest example of its failure

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Threads had no discovery features?! Jesus Christ...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

No hashtags, no full text search. Just an algorithmic feed and a following feed, and you can only search users.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I like how they made the logo look like it says “ADS” throughout.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

It's just companies and influencers, nobody else is posting much there. And half of the influencers are only there to try to get you to follow them somewhere else. (feed is absolutely crammed with Taylor "not wearing a mask outdoors in 2023 is literally genocide" Lorenz hawking her new YouTube channel and I don't even follow her)

Meanwhile Mastodon continues growing steadily, and I'm getting as much engagement there as I ever did on Twitter with maybe 10% as many followers.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Honestly not that big of a deal. When something is hyped up users who either didn't or barely used Twitter (X) probably joined in. It boosted their initial numbers but again they fell off. They'll grow as unique content grows. That happens with everything, as will the case be with Lemmy. Growth isn't linear.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This looks like a hype cycle pattern, and they are entering the trough of disillusionment phase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

Good, hopefully it keeps tanking so we don't have to pay any further mind to it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

And here I am... I've never even tried it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

Sounds like Threads has lost the thread...

I'll see myself out.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Good. I've managed to block tiktok and all meta services from my network.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Similarweb, a digital intelligence platform, shared its data with Gizmodo showing Threads daily active users hovered around 49 million just two days after launch.

David Carr, a senior insights manager at the analysis company, told us the engagement time based on just U.S. user data was slightly more favorable to Threads, but not by much.

Back during its 15 minutes of fame, Threads was leveraged as the fastest-growing platform in the history of apps, hitting 100 million user signups less than a week after launch.

Instagram head Amad Mosseri has also mentioned their intent to connect Threads to the decentralized Fediverse, though whether that drives new-found interest in the app is anyone’s guess.

It was clear from Thread’s launch that users were desperate for a Twitter alternative away from owner Elon Musk’s unending march toward making the platform a pay-to-play hellscape.

A big problem with the app was that it simply didn’t include features found in its main competitors, and the company spent years playing catch up, but all in vain.


I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Absolutely love this bot. No longer need to leave the app to read articles 💪

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

+1 Hate that Connect uses a chrome browser and not my system default. :T

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think there will be more activity once they add more features. It’s very bare-bones right now. I honestly like the app, though, all things considered. I hate Facebook/Meta, but it’s been a nice app to just scroll through, and there’s been enough content to use it as a time killer. They desperately need a proper search feature and a trending page, though, especially if they ever hope to fully replace Twitter. Overall, I like it more than both Mastodon and Bluesky, because discoverability is so awful on Mastodon and Bluesky doesn’t have enough users and content because they haven’t gone public yet. And I very much like the idea and structure of Mastodon much more (with it being open source and federated), but the user experience has been so bad for me, with discoverability being the worst aspect of it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I think the main method of discovery is through your network, and through your local instance. Federated timeline tends to be chaotic, but I definitely like reading my local timeline on my regional masto instance. But I believe that was the intention on the design, no 'trending', no algorithm, just the people you follow.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Yeah, I unironically like trending sections and algorithms, at least to some degree lol I understand the downsides of them, but I enjoy things being shown to me that I'll usually enjoy seeing. The YouTube algorithm for example, despite how finicky it can be to work with as a creator, is very good as a user, in my opinion.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Turns out, the brands and the ads weren't the reason people were sticking to Twitter.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

You mean people aren't hopping on the join the conversation with Crisco and General Mills? Who woulda thunk! I thought for sure that would be the killer application right there.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

They could have picked a better name. Took me a while to figure out that https://threads.com/ isn't the right app. Visiting https://www.threads.net/ wasn't exactly enlightening either.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Because it's so boring. It doesn't have a "trending" tab and every post is an ad.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Puts a smile on my face. Fuck Zucc. Zucc is a cuck

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

10 million DAU's is still pretty impressive

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They should have implemented activity pub support from day 1. They rushed the roll out because they wanted to make us of Twitter's (one of many) fuck ups but failed to keep users.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They probably should have, but I'm glad they didn't.

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