Zuck's Twitter clone has arrived
July 6, 2023 10:58 AM Subscribe

Threads is live. The Meta/Instagram "Twitter killer" supposedly had 30 million installs in 24 hours (Mastodon may have less than 2M active users), likely thanks to the ability to access your entire Instagram social graph automatically. Gruber likes it, but not as much as BlueSky (which is still in closed beta) The Threads website doesn't show content by default, but you can access individual users and ~~tweets~~ ~~toots~~ ~~skeets~~ threads. On the other hand, maybe the age of social media is ending.
posted by gwint (244 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite

Ah so a thread on Threads is a thread. Never would'a figured that out.
posted by sammyo at 11:07 AM on July 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

If it’s activePub then per spec they are “posts”.
posted by Artw at 11:16 AM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

From the 3rd link: Meta’s decision to forgo a chronological feed with Threads — or even a feed just for users you follow

Ugh.
posted by joannemerriam at 11:16 AM on July 6, 2023 [35 favorites]

Ugh.

General reports are that it’s an awful use experience.

Great timing though.

Also great branding for what is effectively a dressed up beta feature for Insta.
posted by Artw at 11:18 AM on July 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

Threads' instagrowth is basically explained by Instagram - Insta users were prompted to install Threads so a lot of their userbase just migrated to it, and the corp accounts and influencers all set up there en masse almost immediately because it's their natural home.

That said: it's kind of shit? There's zero option to read posts chronologically - you have to use the algorithm sorting option. The data scraping is ridiculous. There are tons of functionalities that Twitter has that Threads doesn't, which is sort of inexcusable given that Meta are the ones putting it out.

Meanwhile, Bluesky is honestly pretty nice for now. A lot of Good Twitter has migrated there slowly (due to the invite-only system at present), and people have been vigilant re: blocklists for the assholes who want to go in and make the app all about them like they do everywhere else. Really, the only thing slowing Bluesky's growth is their intentional decision to throttle it while they make sure shit works.
posted by mightygodking at 11:19 AM on July 6, 2023 [18 favorites]

Nice to see they've picked a name which immediately makes Brits my age think of an apocalyptic hellscape.
posted by Paul Slade at 11:21 AM on July 6, 2023 [118 favorites]

Tempted to do this, but the privacy situation is pretty bad.

It is confusing to me. Insta and FB manage to do the necessary work to meet GDPR but this thing is somehow completely illegal in Europe. Again feels like a beta of an Insta feature that’s been rusted to market to exploit the moment, skipping legal and accessibility.
posted by Artw at 11:22 AM on July 6, 2023 [9 favorites]

the privacy situation is pretty bad

Kreig Durham:

"In the few short hours since I started using #Threads, #DuckDuckGo has already blocked over 200 data tracking attempts. These include things like "headphone status" and "screen density.""

posted by JoeZydeco at 11:27 AM on July 6, 2023 [55 favorites]

Also worth noting from what I’ve seen on Twitter about it - if you want to delete your Threads account, you can’t do it without also deleting your Instagram account.
posted by skycrashesdown at 11:27 AM on July 6, 2023 [24 favorites]

@sachee: i wake up to find threads is now exclusively brands talking to each other

i’m glad they found their own safe space 💕
posted by Artw at 11:29 AM on July 6, 2023 [23 favorites]

if you want to delete your Threads account, you can’t do it without also deleting your Instagram account.

As I understand it, It literally IS your Instagram account. Now vaguely concerned if I visit Instagram I’ll end up activating it with a miss click somehow, that being how they get you.
posted by Artw at 11:30 AM on July 6, 2023 [12 favorites]

Tempted to do this, but the privacy situation is pretty bad. On the other hand, I have been pretty complaisant about FB and Instagram already, out of desperation to maintain some kind of connection with my friends and with various scenes --

I was reading Twitter via Nitter so I could avoid the surveillance. This just looks like another way to invite the lurkers into my browser. Hard no.
posted by cybrcamper at 11:32 AM on July 6, 2023 [8 favorites]

@sachee: i wake up to find threads is now exclusively brands talking to each other

i’m glad they found their own safe space 💕

Hopefully with ChatGPT for extra added variety. I remember when someone got Siri and Alexa to talk to each other once and it was a real gas.
posted by cybrcamper at 11:34 AM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

If it’s not chronological then it’s not going to be a Twitter replacement. Twitter is huge during sporting events and news events for chatter and updates (although you have to sift for accurate info, especially with Elon’s little “enhancements” to the site. I don’t have an Instagram account because it can only be used with the app, and I don’t want something that invasive on my phone. I signed up for the bluesky waitlist (but of course an invite would always be accepted ;) )
posted by azpenguin at 11:34 AM on July 6, 2023 [10 favorites]

Immediately upon signing up, I saw posts from LibsofTikTok, MomsforLiberty, and other horrible entities in my feed. Admittedly they were there courtesy replies to their posts by users, but the algo decided I needed to see that. 🚮
posted by msbutah at 11:40 AM on July 6, 2023 [30 favorites]

Same old dark patterns. I remember when I joined Instagram it sent a notification to all of my FB friends, despite my intention to make it a semi-anonymous account.

I doubt they will ever federate with the fediverse, and if they do it won't be good. A giant corporate-controlled instance will have too much leverage, and puts pressure on instance admins to accept speech that is not currently tolerable. That may give them a "we tried but y'all were too woke" excuse to embrace and extinguish.

Besides, Americans should have an app called The Day After.
posted by credulous at 11:40 AM on July 6, 2023 [29 favorites]

Threads just randomly including tons of people I've never followed was such an annoying experience (getting all kinds of weird shit, like bizarre christian influencers and instagram thirstposting models that I don't follow, presumably because people I do follow follow them on insta?) that I deactivated. Realizing I don't need more social media at all.
posted by dis_integration at 11:43 AM on July 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

Jfc no. Hell no. Absolutely not.
posted by rodlymight at 11:44 AM on July 6, 2023 [14 favorites]

Oh what the heck, I'll take one of those Bluesky invites, if they're being offered.

I... don't mind Threads so far. It's dumb that there's no option for a "just people you follow" feed so I don't have to see people talking about about sportsball, terrible music, sneaker drops, celebrity said what?? etc. But setup was a breeze compared to Mastodon. Threads is the social network I'm apparently already on.

Hashtags, lists and a "threadsdeck" interface would also be smart to have. I hope those are coming.
posted by emelenjr at 11:46 AM on July 6, 2023

Lol. Elon big mad:

Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads

Hopefully the copied innovations include such things as “actually pay your engineers (like Twitter used to do when it worked)” and “actually pay for cloud services on an appropriate scale (like Twitter used to do when it worked)”
posted by Artw at 11:48 AM on July 6, 2023 [14 favorites]

I don't get it. These are toxic social ecosystems run by genocide and nazi enablers and loads of people are like, "cool sign me up!" ... just, don't? There's no gun to your head.
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:50 AM on July 6, 2023 [79 favorites]

If anyone's got a Bluesky invite, I too would like to check it out.

No desktop for Threads (and even looking at individual posts doesn't work for me), no just people I follow, no chronological feed. I feel like these are pretty much dealbreakers for the way I use twitter.

I downloaded the app, and as a very sporadic user of IG, I automatically followed all my friends, and didn't see one post by any of them. Add to that the "Brand safe space" and it's not really very appealing. And that's without Meta's terrible privacy invasion.
posted by sauril at 11:52 AM on July 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

So it's a bit like Threads?
posted by farlukar at 11:56 AM on July 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads

Don't you dare use my precious trade secrets like "hiring the people I laid off in a fit of pique" and "hosting a message board"!!! And don't email my wife.
posted by dis_integration at 11:56 AM on July 6, 2023 [13 favorites]

Threads? This is what i think of when i see that name.
posted by Catblack at 11:57 AM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Is Threads really a 'Twitter killer'? Here's what we know so far

When it comes to getting users in the habit of posting on Threads, one of the app's biggest weaknesses may be the very thing that might make the launch a success: the strength of the Meta brand.
Tech analyst Faine Greenwood of Tarentum Consulting calls it the "terrible uncle problem."
"The terrible uncle problem is the issue that comes about when all of your relatives, your colleagues, your high school classmates are able to find you on social media," Greenwood told NPR's Bobby Allyn on NPR's Morning Edition. "Younger people, especially, are turned off a platform where they feel like they have to censor what they're saying."
She added, "They don't want to have to deal with literally everybody they know" being in their social spaces.

That sums up to me the problem of social media, in a nutshell.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:58 AM on July 6, 2023 [21 favorites]

Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads

<galaxybrain>buy a company for far, far more than it's worth and run it into the ground to lure your competitors into a false sense of security making them launch a vaguely similar product so that you can sue them</galaxybrain>
posted by Flunkie at 11:58 AM on July 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

mosseri

I've been getting some questions about deleting your account. To clarify, you can deactivate your Threads account, which hides your Threads profile and content, you can set your profile to private, and you can delete individual threads posts – all without deleting your Instagram account. Threads is powered by Instagram, so right now it's just one account, but we're looking into a way to delete your Threads account separately.

posted by 1970s Antihero at 11:58 AM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Instagram is so massive that Threads feels like it's Meta's game to lose. I'm sort of excited to see how they go about losing it.

Way back in the day, it was possible to see how Mark Zuckerberg was using Facebook. And for a while, at least, Zuck was an enthusiastic user of his own product. Facebook let him post the way he wanted to post, and there was a neat blend of personal-life things, work-life things, and more public-facing posts. His posts on Threads, by contrast, feel bleached. I can't imagine he gives a shit. I can't imagine anybody on Threads gives a shit about Threads.

I don't think that Mastodon will ever replace Twitter, but Mastodon's devs use Mastodon. They give a shit about Mastodon. You can tell. And one of the pleasant surprises about Bluesky, so far, has been that its entire team—not Board Member Jack Dorsey, but the people who actually belong to the company—isn't just active on Bluesky but having fun. Paul Frazee, one of the developers, is so clearly having a blast interacting with the community that it makes the whole of Bluesky feel human and personal and delightful.

Back when Instagram was just a humble start-up, you could tell that Kevin Systrom had built his dream product—and partly that was because he used it like it was. And up until Meta bought it, Instagram was a seriously enjoyable social network to use—well past the point that its scale ought to have left it feeling shitty. Post-acquisition, once Meta started fucking with the formula, you could tell that Systrom et al stopped giving a shit; the app was no longer theirs, so they took their billions and moved on. Now Instagram is arguably worse dreck than Facebook itself.

Zuckerberg knew what he was doing, for a while. He had skin in the game. Now it feels like he couldn't care less about the Internet as a whole. He seems to be having a lot of fun in real life, and good for him, but when was the last time that anybody remotely adjacent to Meta seemed like they were having a good time? Hell, even John Carmack resigned as a VR consultant. Nobody's having fun over there, and the billionaire schmucks all tell themselves that fun doesn't really matter, but there's a pretty storied history of the Internet which suggests that it sorta does. I can't imagine Threads losing ground, given its massive head start, but at the same time, I literally cannot imagine who would genuinely have fun posting on Threads. That feels like a bad sign to me.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 12:00 PM on July 6, 2023 [48 favorites]

I hate algorithm recommendations So. Much.

I literally close Facebook and Instagram if I get three "recommended for you" in a row, and those I do see in the meantime get blocked/muted/etc. Show me the people I have friended and followed. That's what's supposed to be there. Otherwise, why should I friend or follow anyone?

Also, with Threads, people are reporting the massive amount of right-wing monsters who jumped right in with both feet and are loudly announcing themselves, means I likely will never go there.

Even if my friends are all "but we're here", an algorithm isn't ever going to let me see them, so why bother.
posted by AzraelBrown at 12:04 PM on July 6, 2023 [14 favorites]

Too many balding billionaires own social media sites. We need to get rid of both.
posted by Fizz at 12:07 PM on July 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

I have a bad feeling about this.

I mean what could possibly go wrong with a twitter clone started by Zuck and branching off of Instagram?
posted by loquacious at 12:09 PM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

The twitter clones will continue until morale improves
posted by Lanark at 12:15 PM on July 6, 2023 [43 favorites]

Even if it were an awesome user experience I wouldn’t sign up for it or any other Meta product. Too much blood and other nasty things on their hands.
posted by zenzenobia at 12:15 PM on July 6, 2023 [12 favorites]

Add me to the list of people who signed up for Threads but would much prefer to be on Bluesky. Not having an in to get an invite is the limiting factor. I'd love to try out Bluesky but...
posted by thecjm at 12:16 PM on July 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

Product Zuck = product suck.

No rhank you.
posted by hoodrich at 12:19 PM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Is it called Threeads because it shows you 3 ads for every post by someone you follow, Instagram-style?
posted by oulipian at 12:20 PM on July 6, 2023 [17 favorites]

Lol. Elon big mad:

Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads

I'm still halfway convinced that Musk's Twitter takeover coinciding with Dorsey's attempt to launch a replacement microblogging site is all just what they call a "work" in pro-wrestling parlance, i.e. a planned series of events between pretend adversaries (Musk and Dorsey are pals in real life) that are essentially just marketing for the next "big" event.

I can easily believe that Musk is enough of a doofus to run Twitter into the ground through poor management and scaring off the user base. But I can also believe that this might have all been a setup with Dorsey to lead users en masse to Bluesky by tanking Twitter. Either way, Bluesky seems like a lateral move in terms of the platform still being controlled by people who demonstrably do not have the interests of their users at heart.
posted by Strange Interlude at 12:20 PM on July 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Glad a new generation gets to see how far "It's actually GNU/Linux" gets you with a user base who couldn't give a shit about the opaque politics behind the scenes.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 12:21 PM on July 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

I usually use Facebook's chronological feed instead of their algorithmic feed. It's got its problems (it sure seems that it's not a simple "show me everything in chronological order" feed, for some reason), but it's a whole lot better than their default.

The thing that really drives me crazy about their default feed is that it often gets in a mood where it will show me the exact same posts in the exact same order for literally several days in a row, maybe even a week. So, OK Facebook, I get that you really really want to show me this particular post that I have more or less zero interest in, but you've shown it to me as the very first thing dozens of times in a row, and I still haven't interacted with it at all. And meanwhile, I can see from the chronological feed and/or manually poking around that there are a bunch of posts that your algorithm has never shown me, not once.

I get that they need a nonchronological, popularity-et-cetera-based feed for the benefit of the people who subscribe to every one of the trillion "LOL THE FUNNY DAILY BEST" and "DEEP QUOTES THAT ONLY DEEP BRAINY GENIUS PEOPLE WILL SHARE ON THEIR WALL" pages. But even so, what's so difficult about... doing that competently?
posted by Flunkie at 12:21 PM on July 6, 2023 [10 favorites]

A Twitter replacement that doesn't give me the option of "show me *ONLY* the people I *CHOSE* to follow" is a complete non-starter for how I want to use social media.

But that seems to be the current playbook for how they make these things.

From the enshittification essay:

After all, every time Tiktok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to see, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing.

The idea of it conflating the Instagram and Threads accounts with vague claims that they'll figure out how to separate the two in the future also feels like standard practice after whatever they did with Facebook and Oculus accounts. Or back when Google decided to merge my Youtube and Gmail accounts for the sake of Google+
posted by RobotHero at 12:23 PM on July 6, 2023 [14 favorites]

This is like time running backwards from when the iPod was the final form of handheld music devices, with Zunes and Diamond Rios popping into existence.
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:23 PM on July 6, 2023 [11 favorites]

I guess Libs Of TikTok were one of the first groups to sign up for Threads. So that's a thing to be aware of.
posted by hippybear at 12:24 PM on July 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

[ recurring reminder of bluesky being a product of @jack who did bugger all about the nazis on twitter because he liked them ]

But yeah, this new thingy of emperor ~~Augustus~~ Zuck appears to be not too great either.
posted by farlukar at 12:24 PM on July 6, 2023 [15 favorites]

Is this the Rococo period of social media now?
posted by riverlife at 12:26 PM on July 6, 2023 [8 favorites]

A Twitter replacement that doesn't give me the option of "show me *ONLY* the people I *CHOSE* to follow" is a complete non-starter for how I want to use social media.

Well, I mean, Mastodon does this. It doesn't have an algorithm. Discovery is difficult, but after about six months I have a nicely active feed that I can follow. The Local or Federated feeds also are just reverse-chronological feeds of what is in that list.

But yeah, Mastodon has the difficulty if finding who to follow. I beat the bushes of my twitter followers for months and got a lot of them contacted there. I've since dropped social accounts on my twitter, still following bands and the like, and just in the past week three people from twitter have popped back onto Mastodon saying "oh, I might be here more now".

Anyway, Mastodon is not twitter, but it has zero algorithm available, even if you wanted one, which you don't.
posted by hippybear at 12:27 PM on July 6, 2023 [21 favorites]

I guess if I have to choose Billionaires I'll take the socially awkward cyborg over the South African 4Chan Nazi.
posted by little eiffel at 12:28 PM on July 6, 2023 [12 favorites]

recurring reminder of bluesky being a product of @jack who did bugger all about the nazis on twitter because he liked them

He's also endorsing RFK Jr. for president.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 12:28 PM on July 6, 2023 [21 favorites]

I mean, I'll claim my preferred handle on all of them, but Threads sure doesn't look usable. I have told a couple of people about my initial impression, which is that I now see all the influencers and brands that my friends follow. Not really interested, thanks.

(FB and Google have all my information already. I haven't had any privacy online in a long time and I've gotten over it and resigned myself to my fate.)
posted by gentlyepigrams at 12:31 PM on July 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

Anyway, Mastodon is not twitter, but it has zero algorithm available, even if you wanted one, which you don't.

Mastodon, for all the “mastodon is dooomed as a Twitter replacement” articles that are fashionable to run, is growing quite nicely and maturing into something that doesn’t need to be like Twitter at all.

I do wish more comics folk weee there though, they all seem to have fucked off to Bluesky.
posted by Artw at 12:31 PM on July 6, 2023 [10 favorites]

I guess if I have to choose Billionaires I'll take the socially awkward cyborg over the South African 4Chan Nazi.

If I had to choose billionaires I’d take them down in a submarine for a tour of the Titanic and then maybe forget to go myself.
posted by Artw at 12:33 PM on July 6, 2023 [44 favorites]

I'm still halfway convinced that Musk's Twitter takeover coinciding with Dorsey's attempt to launch a replacement microblogging site is all just what they call a "work"

I think we should never forget that Musk was forced to buy Twitter at a huge markup compared to its value at the time and that he tried everything he could to get out of it. I don't see him as capable of that kind of scheming (but also that kind of scheming costing him billions of dollars???). Maybe him running it into the ground is part of some deliberate scheme, but that also seems unlikely since the whole Twitter fiasco has punctured the illusion that Musk maintained even among normies that he was some kind of genius, an attitude only the right wing maniacs have now.
posted by dis_integration at 12:36 PM on July 6, 2023 [11 favorites]

Can someone clarify - if I log into IG, have I joined this thing?
Is it a separate login that I can avoid?

I use Instagram for the artists I follow and cute dogs. And farm animal sanctuary feeds. And those people who make Paris runway spoofs using items from their house. And posting art, too.

I guess I can quit those. And be more productive! Or just watch more YouTube. But maybe both.
posted by Glinn at 12:38 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

If you haven't downloaded the Threads app, you will not be on Threads.
posted by hippybear at 12:39 PM on July 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Threads feels very much like an Instagram extension: well-designed for brands and influencers to broadcast, and for “regular” users to consume that content and occasionally share variations. The people I’ve connected to there are all folks I know in real life, rather than Internet friends.

I don’t expect it to become as weird and thoughtful as Mastodon, or as silly and free-wheeling as Bluesky, or even as argumentative as Twitter. For those reasons, I doubt I’ll spend much time there.

For the same reasons… I predict high adoption, great ad revenue, and regular bonuses for the Meta product managers who build it out. Most people don’t use social media like I do!
posted by learning from frequent failure at 12:40 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Or that's my understanding. That could change or I could be mistaken. But I think right now, if you don't invite the vampire in, it can't cross your doorstep.
posted by hippybear at 12:40 PM on July 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm sure bluesky will be wonderful during the brief period when it gets to curate its userbase. Curated communities are relatively easy to maintain! But they will inevitably open the floodgates, as all such services do, and as all such services do they will find that moderation is a cost center, and it will become the same shitshow as the others. Unless I'm missing something, there is no plan other than "let's do the same thing as last time, because the whole phase when people threw money at us because 'growth' was amazing". What pitch are bluesky and threads making to the users? Is it just "you like using your phone a lot; here's more of that"?
posted by phooky at 12:41 PM on July 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Threads is live everywhere except the EU, for data privacy reasons, although we have read only non account creation access, and our account names can’t be used by someone else.
posted by ellieBOA at 12:41 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

oh god let it end
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:44 PM on July 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

How the heck did they make something so half assed. No tags, no groups, no topic search, why would I ever load this?
posted by interogative mood at 12:50 PM on July 6, 2023

Makes me think of a different Threads
posted by heathkit at 12:50 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

lol I installed and then immediately uninstalled when I read here it was going to use your IG account and delete it if you try to delete threads account. I also hate you can't access it in your browser. Worse ,the animation for the browser somehow lags. My computer is too strong to lag from a website.
posted by GoblinHoney at 12:51 PM on July 6, 2023

Omg also please stop the making of the Threads The Movie joke, we know
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:55 PM on July 6, 2023 [50 favorites]

You could tell the space for Twitter's style of text-first communication was wide open when Instagram started putting a little text box in above your DMs, so you could send something out to all your followers. Mastodon can't capitalise on Twitter's death more than it already has, and Bluesky and other capitalist concerns are dependent on VC cash, I guess. Let a thousand flowers bloom, I guess, because there's no one size that fits all.
posted by The River Ivel at 1:00 PM on July 6, 2023

Makes me think of a different Threads

I mean Zuck's on a roll picking out names that already exist for other things and it's a bit too on the nose to pick one that's a movie about the end of the world in nuclear annihilation.

Which brings up a shower thought I've had many times.

It seems like a smart and emotionally secure billionaire would really want to hire an entire team of court jesters, comedians and witheringly sarcastic assholes to keep their egos in check. Staff it with comedians and script writers for comedy TVs and cartoons and artists, maybe some philosophers or scientists or engineers and whatever.

Then you could bounce your silly ideas and names for things off of them as a whole panel and immediately know all the flaws and the many ways it could be openly mocked instead of surrounding yourself in an insulating bubble of sycophants.

I would honestly be surprised if there wasn't already a consulting service where you could round table ideas against a panel of, well, assholes to tear your ideas to pieces.
posted by loquacious at 1:00 PM on July 6, 2023 [15 favorites]

For reasons described above in great detail (I used it for about 30 minutes) and probably many more reasons that we'll hear about in the coming months: It's a bad product.
posted by Slackermagee at 1:01 PM on July 6, 2023

It's okay, I guess. Which is what I think of Mastodon, too. Twitter had it right, but the Muskrat made sure that ended so here we are.
posted by tommasz at 1:03 PM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mastodon view of the thing: What to know about Threads

Pre-launch I was a bit sniffy about the “defederate on sight” crowd but from what I’m seeing they may have a point.
posted by Artw at 1:04 PM on July 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

I left twitter because Musk bought it. I left insta years ago, I don't even remember why, but I've never regreted it. The only reason I'm still on FB is to stay in contact with friends and family. Threads sounds awful. I think I'll pass.
posted by evilDoug at 1:04 PM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

From now on, we will instead joke that Threads is the platform of choice for folks who read the Pern books and sympathized with the deadly cosmic weather.
posted by cortex at 1:05 PM on July 6, 2023 [42 favorites]

Threads requires a phone app, and i am not about to allow Meta to harvest more data. plus apps slow down the phone, notifications suck, and the use too much battery. Terrible all the way 'round, though I want to grab my name, I guess. I stay on Twitter for Fesshole, the most hilarious read of my day.
posted by theora55 at 1:06 PM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Which reminds me of an early Dragonriders Of Pern computer game that involved flying around and breathing threads out of existence. But I could be hallucinating that, much like an AI might generate something false out of too many memories.
posted by hippybear at 1:07 PM on July 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

Threads itself is profundly uninteresting. But, it's looking possible that the smaller instance side of Mastodon defederates not only from Threads but from the larger instances as well. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.
posted by joeyh at 1:11 PM on July 6, 2023

I would honestly be surprised if there wasn't already a consulting service where you could round table ideas against a panel of, well, assholes to tear your ideas to pieces.

I think that's called Shark Tank.
posted by Twain Device at 1:11 PM on July 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Thanks, cortex, now I've got to start my genetic research program to produce telepathic dragons that can battle the threat of social media.
posted by phooky at 1:11 PM on July 6, 2023 [10 favorites]

The thing that really drives me crazy about their default feed is that it often gets in a mood where it will show me the exact same posts in the exact same order for literally several days in a row, maybe even a week.

I just decided to check. The one FB is currently showing me first all-or-virtually-all the time is from June 27. Nine days ago. The number of comments on it can be counted on one hand. None of them are from me. Only one is from a person I am friends with - and that's the very person who made the post itself. The like/wow/etc. count requires two count 'em two hands, but again there's only one person who I'm friends with who made one of those reactions.

What is it about this post that FB thinks I desperately need? It's just baffling.
posted by Flunkie at 1:12 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Artw, Oh yeah, there's constant drama, but a full partition would be drama of another order, and could fundamentally change the character of at least half of the network.
posted by joeyh at 1:14 PM on July 6, 2023

I may be biased here, what with having run a Mastodon instance since 2017. I am almost certainly biased.

But more and more I am coming to feel that social media simply does not belong in the hands of for-profit companies.

Threads should be illegal. Facebook should be illegal. Twitter should be illegal. TikTok, YouTube, all illegal. Anything anywhere *near* the scale of these things should simply not be allowed to be in the hands of a for-profit corporation.

Social media should be government-sponsored. Money for running it, and a lot of the jobs of running it, should come through the Post Office. And libraries. And the support structures for public broadcasting. Because fundamentally all of these parts of the government are about access to information and communication.

Obviously we are a long way from the world where this is the case, all of those parts of the government have had their funding sliced to the bone by the right-wingers for my entire life. But still. That's my current dream for social media. Fuck Zuck, fuck Musk, fuck Bytedance, fuck Google, fuck 'em all.

Oh yeah, and search engines should be government-sponsored, too. Same reasons.
posted by egypturnash at 1:16 PM on July 6, 2023 [70 favorites]

Which reminds me of an early Dragonriders Of Pern computer game that involved flying around and breathing threads out of existence. But I could be hallucinating that, much like an AI might generate something false out of too many memories.

If you're hallucinating that, it might be a shared one, because I remember it too. That was one of my favorite games, way back in the 1980s. It was so much more involved than the typical computer game of the time - yes, there was the "action" part as you described, and that was pretty cool in and of itself, but there was also a... dynastic intrigue part, or something? which was not realtime, and was totally great. You made and broke alliances with other houses (or whatever they were called). I forget the details, but I remember that it was way ahead of its time.
posted by Flunkie at 1:18 PM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

OK this is the least of their crimes, but on the (read-only) web interface, clicking on the logo *toggles the dark theme* for the page. In what bizarre universe is that a thing you use the app logo for?
posted by Karmakaze at 1:19 PM on July 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

egypturnash: thank you for once again reframing reality for me in a way that I find useful
posted by hippybear at 1:19 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

The one FB is currently showing me first all-or-virtually-all the time is from June 27.

I follow groups on FB where people post events, but I've pretty much given up on those because I see a lot of "event on July 3rd (posted 4 days ago)" being the first I hear of them. This is especially bad for rummage sales, where people can't actually post pictures until the Saturday morning, but they don't hit my feed until Sunday or Monday once the engagements push it up high enough in the algorithm.

Me, I like Mastodon. I don't think it was that hard to find people to follow -- maybe I think outside the box but you can see a firehose feed of everyone your instance is federated with, and follow people from there, but then also you can find other mastodon servers, look at their local feed, follow new people, repeat ad infinitum. This process could be made easier maybe. But, like, here, see everything that's happening on MeFi's Mastodon instance, follow everybody from your account on a different instance, boom, you've found people to follow.
posted by AzraelBrown at 1:21 PM on July 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Aha! Dragonriders of Pern (1983, C64) - Thread Fighting (as the title suggest, it only shows the action part of the game).
posted by Flunkie at 1:21 PM on July 6, 2023 [9 favorites]

The amazing thing for me is that for a product that's intended to have global reach, they've picked a name that's incredibly hard for most non native english speakers to pronounce. The "th" is hard enough, but follow that with an "r"...tough.
posted by conifer at 1:22 PM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

It had to be a C64 game. That's what me and my computer buddy had at the time. Thanks!
posted by hippybear at 1:23 PM on July 6, 2023

Wait, Threads was pulling some Barrier Peaks shit and was Science Fiction all along?
posted by Artw at 1:23 PM on July 6, 2023

And here's a walkthrough of some of the playthrough! OMG I hope my C64 still works!
posted by Flunkie at 1:25 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Apparently you can post images but there is currently no ability to put Alt text on any images, so bravah on feckin up the very basics of Web Accessibilty.
posted by Faintdreams at 1:26 PM on July 6, 2023 [9 favorites]

No desktop plus not having a (mostly) chronological list of posts means I'll give it a pass for now. Maybe there will become a compelling reason to join later?

I use IG purely to periodically browse tattoo artists, who all seem to post their work there. It works great for that, at least, but from reading all the descriptions here I am just not seeing this current iteration as a Twitter-killer.

I literally close Facebook and Instagram if I get three "recommended for you" in a row, and those I do see in the meantime get blocked/muted/etc. Show me the people I have friended and followed. That's what's supposed to be there. Otherwise, why should I friend or follow anyone?

I do exactly the same thing with FB. Three suggestions and I'm out. It goes through cycles, sometimes the suggestions are every other post, and other times it doesn't suggest anything for weeks. I detest that "feature".
posted by Dip Flash at 1:32 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

What’s everyone Threeting about?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:33 PM on July 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

institui. vidi. inauguratus sum. discessi.
posted by y2karl at 1:41 PM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I looked at it for about 10 minutes; long enough to set up, poke around, and wonder who all these people/accounts were already in my timeline (instead of starting basically empty and letting me add folks to follow). Deleted it.
posted by jquinby at 1:42 PM on July 6, 2023

> But more and more I am coming to feel that social media simply does not belong in the hands of for-profit companies.

the only way to stop eternal september is by throwing a new october.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 1:42 PM on July 6, 2023 [8 favorites]

When I said don't threaten me with a good time I didn't mean I was looking for a bad one.
posted by East14thTaco at 1:43 PM on July 6, 2023 [15 favorites]

On the other hand, maybe the age of social media is ending.

While there are still dogs pooping, cars with loud mufflers driven by (clutches pearls) riff-raff from across town, people lighting fireworks after 10pm in flagrant violation of HOA bylaw 5.7.a(i), and kids playing on lawns, Nextdoor.com will tick along with plenty to complain about.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 1:46 PM on July 6, 2023 [12 favorites]

And disrespectful cashiers! Don't forget disrespectful cashiers.
posted by Flunkie at 1:49 PM on July 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Yes, disrespectful cashiers. And ANY TOPIC TO DO WITH PICKLEBALL. Because ultimately any true debate on Nextdoor ends in you having to take a stand one side or the other on pickleball. (may just be my locale - I bet that disrespectful cashier plays pickleball....)
posted by inflatablekiwi at 1:57 PM on July 6, 2023 [10 favorites]

I've glimpsed at Nextdoor in my area, which admittedly is not fantastic about social issues, and while never having joined what I've seen is a lot of "the wrong kind of person is in our neighborhood" kind of posts, so I've never joined.
posted by hippybear at 2:00 PM on July 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Threads should be illegal. Facebook should be illegal. Twitter should be illegal. TikTok, YouTube, all illegal. Anything anywhere *near* the scale of these things should simply not be allowed to be in the hands of a for-profit corporation.

Here here.
posted by hoodrich at 2:01 PM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Nextdoor is another one where it seems to be insistent that I shouldn't limit my feed to my actual neighbourhood. Every time I set that in my preferences, it informs me this will expire in 60 days. When the time is up, it starts sending me posts from a region 8 times the size of what I asked for.
posted by RobotHero at 2:05 PM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Nextdoor was hyper racist when I checked it out. It was disgusting, nope.
posted by tiny frying pan at 2:08 PM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

It looks like Mastodon will be able to view Threads content (and presumably vice versa) with a bit of configuration magic on the right server, at least according to the Mastodon folks. So, in principle, this might mean that a broader social network could be engaged in without giving all your info to Meta by default.

That's kind of attractive.

I'm a little encouraged. I must say between Twitter and Reddit, I hope the days of single companies running their own social media networks are starting to be over. But we'll see. I'm sure it's all going to go bad some way we haven't thought of yet.
posted by bonehead at 2:11 PM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

egypturnash: Social media should be government-sponsored.

Wikipedia: As with many Chinese companies, [TikTok operator] ByteDance has an internal Chinese Communist Party (CCP) committee with Vice President Zhang Fuping serving as the company's CCP Committee Secretary. In 2018, Zhang Fuping stated that ByteDance should "transmit the correct political direction, public opinion guidance and value orientation into every business and product line." [...] In April 2021, a state-owned enterprise owned by the Cyberspace Administration of China and China Media Group, the China Internet Investment Fund, purchased a 1% stake in ByteDance's main Chinese entity and placed a government official, Wu Shugang, on its board of directors.

egypturnash: Oh yeah, and search engines should be government-sponsored, too.

Wikipedia: According to the China Digital Times, [top search engine] Baidu has a long history of being the most active and restrictive online censor in the search arena. [...] In 2017, Baidu began coordinating with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security as well as 372 Internet police departments to detect information related to "anti-government rumors"
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 2:12 PM on July 6, 2023 [12 favorites]

I'm rooting for the days of self-hosted web instances and webrings coming back. Although without ICQ I don't know how to bring back the way to chat with people really.
posted by hippybear at 2:13 PM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

I wish for a government that isn’t assholes fairly frequently tbh.
posted by Artw at 2:14 PM on July 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

Nextdoor was hyper racist when I checked it out. It was disgusting, nope.

Which is the right decision. I joined because I moved to a location just at the start of covid and literally couldn't meet my neighbors in person.....everyone was social distancing....so I thought oh well I'll maybe meet a few online. Now its like an ongoing train wreck it's hard not to watch with popcorn - and wow do you soon discover which neighbors you want to avoid meeting in-person.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 2:14 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I EAT TAPAS: you're references are cute, but outside of China are not actually reflective of anyone's internet experience, and maybe doing more research into how various social media companies are actually financed and what kind of data they harvest, OUTSIDE of China, might be more helpful to this discourse.
posted by hippybear at 2:15 PM on July 6, 2023 [8 favorites]

When the time is up, it starts sending me posts from a region 8 times the size of what I asked for.

If Nextdoor does not have any racist posts from your specific neighborhood, it will increase its search radius until it finds one.
posted by gimonca at 2:16 PM on July 6, 2023 [28 favorites]

admittedly haven't read the whole thread (heh) but come on people, why involve yourself with these awful awful horrible people? Haven't they abused us all enough? Is it really worth it? I just don't get it.
posted by flamk at 2:16 PM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

hippybear: maybe doing more research into how various social media companies are actually financed and what kind of data they harvest, OUTSIDE of China, might be more helpful to this discourse.

Wikipedia: In December 2021, Russian state-owned bank Gazprombank and insurance company Sogaz bought out 57.3% of [top Russian social media site] VK shares, thus becoming the holders of the company's controlling interest. [...] In December 2021, VKontakte's CEO, Boris Dobrodeev resigned from his post. Reuters linked Dobrodeev's resignation to the acquisition of VK's majority interest by two state-owned companies that happened the same month. According to one analyst, the state consolidation of VKontakte would cause greater censorship by the government.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 2:20 PM on July 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

In the future, we will all have our own personal social media network for fifteen minutes.

I never use Instagram, so I'm waiting on Bluesky to ping me, though I sense that no alternative will achieve the level of ubiquity that Twitter had any time soon. Twitter let me find distant friends, kindred souls, dark dark dark humor, breaking news, horrific takes on breaking news, law chat, sports chat, random jokes and cats all in the same generalized feed. I'm expecting whatever social media network I choose to be sort of like Reddit -- great if you're keying into a very specific set of people and topics, nightmarish otherwise.
posted by delfin at 2:20 PM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Your Nextdoors sound nice. Mine is 60% property crime, 30% violent crime, and 10% missing/found pets.
posted by meowzilla at 2:21 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Paul Slade: Nice to see they've picked a name which immediately makes Brits my age think of an apocalyptic hellscape.

If they really followed though, they’d sign that lady who pissed herself as a celebrity endorser.
posted by dr_dank at 2:25 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Margaret Thatcher?
posted by hippybear at 2:28 PM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

A gentle reminder that the state ownership issues that I EAT TAPAS refers to are not particularly relevant. Authoritarian governments have financially underwritten Facebook and enriched Zuckerberg and other shareholders personally, resulting in diminished civil liberties and attacks on other democracies, and also actual murders of human beings at the hands of these same states, with the technological assistance of private social media companies.

These are toxic social ecosystems run by genocide and nazi enablers and loads of people are like, "cool sign me up!"

I am honestly a bit shocked how a number of people I follow — individuals who are collectively targets of bigotry and violence that Zuckerberg's assets have emboldened and enabled — have been eager to sign up for and use this. Humanity seems to be cursed with the equivalent short-term memory of my nine-year old pug.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:34 PM on July 6, 2023 [16 favorites]

maybe the age of social media is ending

From your keyboard to God's, um, inbox?
posted by slkinsey at 2:34 PM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

What does Threads feels like?

Threads feels like when a local restaurant you enjoy opens a location in an airport.

It feels like a Twitter alternative you would order from Brookstone.

It feels like if an entire social network was those posts that tell you what successful entrepreneurs do before 6AM.

It feels like watching a Powerpoint from the Brand Research team where they tell you that Pop Tarts is crushing it on social.

It feels like Casual Friday on LinkedIn.

Will Threads last? I don’t know. It is an app stuffed with verified users I’ve never heard of who have 7 million YouTube subscribers. They all do Epic Pranks and they spread Positive Vibes and they Don’t Talk Politics Here.

I keep waiting for these guys to collapse but they never do, so probably Threads won’t either for awhile.
posted by Artw at 2:41 PM on July 6, 2023 [24 favorites]

That the first two examples in that article are "this is using an airport as a metaphor", that tells me plenty about who is on Threads, and that isn't me.
posted by hippybear at 2:45 PM on July 6, 2023

So we actually had a house explode out here in the Chicago suburbs and, as luck would have it, it happened on July 1st.

I comb Nextdoor for fun and the posts were literally, in order:

- These fireworks just keep getting louder!
- What's with these kids?!?
- Alright enough with the insane fireworks!
- Um, hey, so a house just exploded in Lisle...
- I'm in Lisle! Why can't the police do something about these fireworks?

etc etc etc.
posted by JoeZydeco at 2:49 PM on July 6, 2023 [12 favorites]

Ignoring the social networking aspect, what Threads can do is 'easily post updates online which anyone with the account url can view in a web browser without logging in.' That was one of the most real-world useful aspects of Twitter, I think, until a week ago when that functionality was removed.
posted by kickingtheground at 2:53 PM on July 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

It’s sort of back, and sort of not. TBH the whole thing is so janky right now best to just assume “not”.
posted by Artw at 2:55 PM on July 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

I mean, I'm sorry for the people whose house exploded, but no one should ever go to the Frogton Hardware on West Miniblot Street ever again. I cannot believe how I was treated.
posted by Flunkie at 3:02 PM on July 6, 2023 [8 favorites]

Gruber likes it

Yeah, well. I'm not inclined to give much weight to Gruber's opinion here.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 3:17 PM on July 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

One fediverse admin:

People talk hard about blocking Threads because of numerous privacy issues / surveillance capitalism reasons.

but, I'm likely blocking them for much more boring reasons.... They have hundreds of TBs of storage, unlimited bandwidth and a marketing budget (5 million people signed by in the first few hours).

#Meta has the ability to simple price administrators out of the market - using the classic method of just outspending your enemy with a dumptruck of money - Simply by existing in the same ecosystem as us, they can and will increase our server/storage costs until admins like myself drop out. (THANK YOU PATRONS/SUPPORTERS)

If I wanted to open communicate with #Threads -- I fear I simply won't be able to play the same game as them for very long.... and I foresee plenty of other admins dropping out for that reason

posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:20 PM on July 6, 2023 [11 favorites]

Oh yeah, and search engines should be government-sponsored, too. Same.

And which government should run that? China would be more than happy to take that job offer and they have a great portfolio of control workings for you to approve of.

You have actual FOIA documents like Operations Northwoods or MK-Ultra. Books like The Mighty Wurlitzer. Or even factual things being framed as 'having the hallmarks of a nation state pysop'.

Have you sat down with 1970's US civil rights movement people and asked them what they think of US government control of information? Have you asked Reality Winter, Vera English, Peter Buxton, Mark Felt, Joe Darby, Frank Serpico, Karen Silkwood, Smedly Butler about this master plan (some may be hard to reach these days)? How about posters on this very website who expressed concern over da Gulf War? Are the findings of the Church commission all addressed and in the past so The Government is totes kool?

On what basis should "the government" be trusted? Should the US Federal government been trusted from 2016 to 2020? If not, why?

Oh and if you ARE gonna complain about the corporate overlords while thinking The Government will do a better job, do explain how The Government buying the data mining services of the corporate overlords is OK.
posted by rough ashlar at 3:26 PM on July 6, 2023 [12 favorites]

I honesty think the proposal is that government take over social media and stop data mining services, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the entire basis for your objection is wrong. Maybe we do to social media networks what we did the Ma Bell way back when and chop them up until they're basically meaningless in the differences in what they provide?

You're not imaginative enough to envision what life could be like without the major internet domains.
posted by hippybear at 3:32 PM on July 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

W/r/t Government taking over monopolies, a median approach is the anti-trust tradition, that used to be an American political staple of populism.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:35 PM on July 6, 2023 [12 favorites]

There’s a grand internet tradition of the Usenet days… Universities of the World, Join the Fediverse!
posted by Artw at 3:38 PM on July 6, 2023

You're not imaginative enough to envision what life could be like without the major internet domains.

yea, me running my own mail server and web site shows my personal lack of imagination WRT life without "major internet domains". Same for my /24 and AS number, yup I have no imagination.

The Government has a long history of messing with people who don't reflect the preferred government position. But by all means show how the findings of The Church Commission were so well addressed and have not come back in new forms.

Other governments ARE addressing data mining and hate speech issues. The Twitter Fines-for-violations sin-a-matic universe is just starting to show how governments can play a role.
posted by rough ashlar at 3:44 PM on July 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Great! Now we just need a Threads killer.
posted by kirkaracha at 3:44 PM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Facebook's Threads is so depressing
Like a $19 turkey sandwich at an airport
posted by joeyh at 3:46 PM on July 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

We'll always have The Cage Match.

Or not.

Zuck should bring whale lice. Just sayin'...
posted by y2karl at 4:04 PM on July 6, 2023

Google should revive Reader and G+. The time is ripe.
posted by jzb at 4:19 PM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

No. no no no. G+ should never be revived.
posted by hippybear at 4:23 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

From now on, we will instead joke that Threads is the platform of choice for folks who read the Pern books and sympathized with the deadly cosmic weather.

Mods! Cortex is thread sitting! *ducks*

What’s everyone Threeting about?

Oh my God, it's full of ~~twits~~ ~~threets~~ threats!
posted by loquacious at 4:29 PM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'd be quite happy with Google Groups.
posted by bonehead at 4:45 PM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Don't threads on me
posted by Artw at 4:46 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

These are toxic social ecosystems run by genocide and nazi enablers and loads of people are like, "cool sign me up!"

like so…
posted by Artw at 4:56 PM on July 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

Is the idea that social networks should be government run popular enough to warrant a takedown!
posted by Selena777 at 5:25 PM on July 6, 2023

Say what you will about ByteDance and the CCP but my experience has been a lot more fact oriented and positive than Twitter and Facebook. When I scroll Facebook I feel bad, when I watch TikTok’s I feel informed and happier, even for the political content.
posted by interogative mood at 6:06 PM on July 6, 2023

As long as it hurts Musk it serves a purpose. I wish terrible things on Zuck, but Musk is a global menace and must be stopped, so if Threads can hurt him then I hope it does exactly well enough to hurt Musk, and no better.

…and Dorsey is a fuckin’ tool, so if you hate Zuck or Musk you should hate Dorsey too. Best case scenario none of them get enough traction to survive so all three fail.
posted by aramaic at 6:12 PM on July 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Which government do you want to run social media? If it's the US it would be legally required to platform Nazis, because any complaints that moderation violates their first amendment rights would actually be true.

And if the elected officials can't block people accessing accounts, how would even having a blocking tool be legal in the US?

Governments don't have a great history WRT censorship. But by all means show how government would be the better manager.
posted by rough ashlar at 6:12 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

@sachee: i wake up to find threads is now exclusively brands talking to each other

i’m glad they found their own safe space 💕

This is all I can think of: Furbies all the way.
posted by JoeXIII007 at 6:13 PM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Why yes of course the social media in the US would be run by the Chinese government, rough ashlar. Obviously. Either that or Russia. Or perhaps France.

Anyway. USPS. They should be running email infrastructure instead of Google, too. Or maybe the library system. Would you trust the kind of person who becomes a librarian to be a good steward of the local node of the People's Glorious Social Network?

Back to trying to get my Mastodon instance updated. It's being a real pain in the ass this time.
posted by egypturnash at 6:30 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think many of the things we now regard as corporate services related to the internet should be public utilities, whether run nationally or in more local jurisdictions. Basic connectivity for certain, but also email and cloud storage. These are things people need today like they needed electricity in decades past. And like television in days past, it needs to be accessible to everyone.

We have a lot of social reform to do, but I don't see it as impossible if we can get the messaging right for a good long while.

We're kind of at the place with a lot of these giant social networks that we were at with Ma Bell back in the day. I don't know what the breakup would look like, certainly not a reflection of the Baby Bells that came after that, but we as a country and a people deserve better than what we have today.

We need to start thinking and talking about a different internet future so we can shake out what form it would take and how to make it happen.
posted by hippybear at 6:34 PM on July 6, 2023 [12 favorites]

Reminder to my fellow late-capitalism Americans: there are more ways to run things than public corporation and the government. Require them to be non-profit! Require them to be worker co-ops! The Ma Bell reference is on point: there's a strong precedent for regulating the hell out of providers of "network goods".
posted by McBearclaw at 6:36 PM on July 6, 2023 [30 favorites]

Twitter Dead After Musk Shits Bed; Users Head to Threads Instead
posted by dephlogisticated at 6:40 PM on July 6, 2023 [23 favorites]

Why a tabloid hasn't hired you by now, I have no idea.
posted by hippybear at 6:44 PM on July 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

If we didn’t have public libraries, it would probably be hard to imagine a government service that could provide information without it being overtaken by the evil government’s evil impulses. But…
posted by zenzenobia at 6:55 PM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Social media should be government-sponsored. Money for running it, and a lot of the jobs of running it, should come through the Post Office. And libraries. And the support structures for public broadcasting. Because fundamentally all of these parts of the government are about access to information and communication.

*Republican Party licks its chops*

Folks, have any of you seen who gets elected to office? There's no way a government run information entity could be ratfucked, right? And even if you can somehow get public social networks programmed by fellas with compassion and vision, I'm sure many of us mefites will be thrilled to have a public platform that actually has to abide by First Amendment protections.

Require them to be non-profit! Require them to be worker co-ops! The Ma Bell reference is on point: there's a strong precedent for regulating the hell out of providers of "network goods".

Yes... non profits... *rubs temples*

There's also pretty strong precedent for deregulating the hell out of providers of network goods.

There are many alternative social network platforms already. There's absolutely nothing throttling their experience, other than lack of users. Breaking up existing platforms to stay broken up just intensifies the problem of too few users.

Ah, if only the world would internet in a way I could approve.
posted by 2N2222 at 7:12 PM on July 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Will Threads last? I don’t know. It is an app stuffed with verified users I’ve never heard of who have 7 million YouTube subscribers. They all do Epic Pranks and they spread Positive Vibes and they Don’t Talk Politics Here.

Zuckerberg doesn't always know in what ways people want to be cynically profited off of, but he gets it right often enough to be sitting atop a firehouse of advertising money.
posted by clawsoon at 7:54 PM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

If only you would articulate what you actually approve of... *scratches ass*
posted by McBearclaw at 8:00 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don't know why people keep bringing up the dangers of government control of social media. They already control Facebook. It is a profitable arrangement for Facebook shareholders.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:05 PM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Say what you will about ByteDance and the CCP

...you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"
posted by hangashore at 8:22 PM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

TikTok makes me fitter, happier, more productive.
posted by otsebyatina at 8:25 PM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

What is this “Threads” business? I thought Elon Musk was supposed to be the “Twitter killer”.
posted by Naberius at 9:12 PM on July 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

This delightfully stupid news made me belly laugh: ABC News: Twitter sends Meta cease-and-desist letter over new Threads app
posted by Pronoiac at 9:48 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

okay so what if communicating everyone to everyone all the time is bad. like, that’s a possible thing, right? it seems like something that’s possible.

there’s this book that’s kind of trendy right now, _seeing like a state_ by I think his name is james scott or something like that, which argues that a lot of the rationalizing reforms of the 18^th through 20^th century, from the bureaucratic nation-building projects of the french revolution to taylorism to the bolshevik collectives, tended to introduce inefficiency rather than remove it — basically, their only advantage was that they made the processes of living/commerce/manufacturing visible to centralized power. james scott (i think that’s his name?) uses the phrase “local guide” a lot — so, like, before the revolution in france if you wanted to do business in a particular region that wasn’t your own you’d have to have a local guide to get you the insider knowledge of the particular area and the complicated unique networks of power there, and god help you if you were an administrator trying to keep track of the state’s finances because all the tax codes were complicated tangles of rights and privileges dating back to charlemagne or whatever and oh yeah there’s a good chance you wouldn’t even be able to understand what people outside your region would say all the time because french as a unified standardized language was itself an invention of the revolution.

anyway, search engines are bad, full stop, like it’s not that our current crop of search engines are bad, there’s never going to be some new search engine out there that beats google on morality in the same way that google beat alta vista on quality of result, because search engines are about surfacing information about communities without having to rely on a local guide to introduce you to them. which is just plain bad — they flatten out particularities and thereby introduce inefficiencies.

or at least so says the writer whose name may or may not be james scott.

anyway.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:07 PM on July 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

Threads won’t be fun — but it will give brands a refuge from Twitter
posted by Artw at 10:18 PM on July 6, 2023

Oh gross. Various hate accounts being cutesy.
posted by Artw at 10:25 PM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

James Scott it is
posted by away for regrooving at 11:02 PM on July 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

On the topic of government-run social media companies:

Not a ruling, but a Trump-era judge just blocked all communications between the federal government and social media companies, claiming that the former put pressure on the companies to suppress free speech (eg: conservative opinions): Judge rules White House pressured social networks to “suppress free speech”
posted by meowzilla at 11:12 PM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

without even reading the article about "giving brands a refuge from Twitter", this is a daft proposition.

Brands want to be where I am. I do not care if brands are where I am and often positively do not want them there. I don't think people are going to flock to an un-fun Threads because it's where brands are -- and if there are no people, brands will not bother either.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:00 AM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Countess Elena: Tempted to do this, but the privacy situation is pretty bad. On the other hand, I have been pretty complaisant about FB and Instagram already

Well, let me put it this way: if I were riding a motorcycle, and also drunk, that would not be a good reason to also opt out of wearing my helmet because I was already riding a motorcycle while drunk.
posted by Too-Ticky at 3:04 AM on July 7, 2023 [9 favorites]

One of many factors to take into account, if you are choosing which social media place to put your resource (time, emotional energy especially, money?!) in the short and medium terms, is that next US presidential election is less than a year and a half away - and also it's increasingly likely that the next UK general election will be around the same time.

Where do you want to hang out online in the run-up to, and during, these? Twitter (if still functioning), Masterdon, MetaFilter, Bluesky, Threads, MySpace (it's still going and you can still sign up; Tom said it was "the future"), Facebook, somewhere else, nowhere else, a remote hut on a mountain in Norway with no Internet connection, other....
posted by Wordshore at 3:41 AM on July 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

You made and broke alliances with other houses (or whatever they were called).

Weyrs, Holds, and Halls. I love the Pern nerd stuff, but it shows I’ve gotten old because it didn’t occur to me.

I just installed Threads for work reasons and it said right in it that it’s going to be a part of the fediverse soon. (Link goes to an info page on Instagram.)
posted by warriorqueen at 4:17 AM on July 7, 2023

The linked Atlantic piece exudes the breezy ignorance typical of the establishment that knows itself to be the center of the universe: we are important; therefore, anything we don't know or haven't experienced can't be very important; unless it is, in which case we'll be the ones to "discover", "explore", and "contextualize" it for you. It's the kind of confidence game you need to bill $26,000 in expenses for a "stakeholder alignment workshop", which is why I guess McKinsey teaches how to write like this.

The piece proceeds from the idea that before "social media", which focuses on broadcasting, you had "social networks", which focused on connection:

Instead of connection—forging latent ties to people and organizations we would mostly ignore—social media offered platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts. Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones). The results have been disastrous but also highly pleasurable, not to mention massively profitable—a catastrophic combination.

This totally ignores that the WWW featured content sharing and creation from its inception. It's the reason why the very first WWW browser included an "Edit" function, and why Netscape Navigator included a beast of a HTML editor/publisher called Composer by default, well into the 2000's. This is why we still have "View Source". In so far as the article suggests that self-publishing was a technical innovation of social media, it's just not true.

Indeed, platforms like Facebook and Instagram made it more difficult to reach people beyond their walled gardens. They didn't "offer platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible" -- no, they raised the barrier to entry, by requiring users to participate in their closed system, or be left out. In doing so, however, they also raised the pay-off, by introducing winner-takes-all dynamics. The platform is the arena; the users are the gladiators.

In short, the article has it exactly backwards. Before "social media", the web was about content and where to find it (ie. what you know). After social media, it became about people and how to connect to them (ie. who you know). It's not a coincidence that the "who you know" modality is a quality that social media has in common with kleptocracies and rampantly corrupt economies.
posted by dmh at 4:33 AM on July 7, 2023 [18 favorites]

So, is this that cage match?
posted by eustatic at 5:56 AM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Too-Ticky: you're right. I didn't join, and I appreciate these comments for showing me why. I guess I'll just wait to get off the BlueSky waiting list. I don't know anyone who has invites, I don't think. *winsome sigh*

Wordshore: during the 2020 election particularly, and other elections before or since, I had intense daydreams about being on Bouvet Island, which, legally, is in fact a Norwegian mountain with a hut on it. They weren't nice daydreams; I would have a bad, bad time, especially as a vegetarian. But they were comforting. I was getting literal scintillating scotomas from the stress.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:13 AM on July 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

All this angst about where we should go once Twitter implodes is why I'm now on Gravity, the low stakes Japanese SNS that no one, including most Japanese people, know or care about.
posted by LostInUbe at 6:27 AM on July 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

"The Zuck suck is in full swing. In the few short hours since I started using #Threads, #DuckDuckGo has already blocked over 200 data tracking attempts. These include things like "headphone status" and "screen density." - Kreig Durham, Mastodon
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 8:22 AM on July 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

In other words, Threads can't get around whatever Duck Duck Go's doing to block stuff, which means both sides are operating the way they're supposed to.
posted by emelenjr at 9:50 AM on July 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

Apologies if this has been posted before and flag it for deletion. As far as I can tell, Threads is not exactly drowning in praise. From Garbage Day's Ryan Broderick today:

I decided not to follow anyone. And so, for the last couple days, I have only been seeing the raw machinery of Threads. Its algorithm is just blasting me with random posts and, every so often, it tries to show me more of a particular user I click on or spend too long reading in the feed. My verdict: Threads sucks shit. It has no purpose. It is for no one. It launched as a content graveyard and will assuredly only become more of one over time. It’s iFunny for people who miss The Ellen Show. It has a distinct celebrities-making-videos-during-COVID-lockdown vibe. It feels like a 90s-themed office party organized by a human resources department. And my theory, after staring into its dark heart for several days, is that it was never meant to “beat” Twitter — regardless of what Zuckerberg has been tweeting. Threads’ true purpose was to act as a fresh coat of paint for Instagram’s code in the hopes it might make the network relevant again. And Threads is also proof that Meta, even after all these years, still has no other ambition aside from scale.

From Ed Zitron's newsletter yesterday:
The problem with Threads is that Zuckerberg — and Meta, for that matter — is terrible at product development. Threads is a messy, ugly app, with one extremely aggressive algorithmic feed that floods you with influencers asking questions like “what’s everyone up to?” and accounts that aggregate memes. You may occasionally see someone you follow, but they’re quickly drowned out by people you don’t know making the least-astute points a person has ever made.
posted by Bella Donna at 11:19 AM on July 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

I don’t know if it’s Threads related, but IG is loading like poop today. (Not using Threads, won’t be.)
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 12:06 PM on July 7, 2023

Before "social media", the web was about content and where to find it (ie. what you know). After social media, it became about people and how to connect to them (ie. who you know). It's not a coincidence that the "who you know" modality is a quality that social media has in common with kleptocracies and rampantly corrupt economies.

Forgive me in advance for taking this extremely astute thing you said and running with it, but as someone who finds social media endlessly fascinating, I think you hit the nail on the head here—and at the same time, how that came to be is itself deeply weird and interesting, and more than a little accidental.

I'm low-key engrossed by the kinds of personal web pages that folks who pre-dated the Internet maintain: Don Knuth, Tim Berners-Lee, et al. There's a weird consistency to them, something in between Wikipedia entry and Geocities site. More than anything, they're a series of pointers: references to various nodes on various web sites where you might find something relevant of theirs. And it's especially true of people who flat-out do not use social media. A lot of more "contemporary" personal pages just have a one-paragraph bio and social media links, the way that there's a whole cottage industry that'll generate you a series of links to your various social presences. When folks don't have social media, their online presence seems to get messier and more organic; those nodes and those pointers have stranger, rougher shapes, for the simple reason that the presence they're offering hasn't been "standardized" in any sense.

Ever since The Verge's excellent article about the birth and death of Google Reader (MeFi discussion here), I've been thinking about how blogs and RSS were the proto-social network in a lot of ways. It wasn't just that you had the means to follow various individuals' output: it was that, for the first time, there was a way of accessing the internet that privileged dynamic content over static. If you follow somebody's RSS feed, their online presence shrinks down to whatever that feed is sourced from. It's still just a series of nodes and pointers, and it's more flexible than what followed it—a feed's URLs can point anywhere online, not just to a single blog—but if you use RSS to keep up with the Internet, you don't see anybody's "online presence" beyond their updates.

This helped me make some sense of how Reddit functions as social media. In a lot of ways, Reddit is a wild card: subreddits feel more like forums than any other popular site. But Reddit's lineage points directly back to blogging and RSS. Reddit's predecessor, Digg, was basically just an RSS feed of pointers to various places online; Reddit offers a wide variety of subjects, and allows for "self" posts, but it's still basically a feed of links. Weirdly, "self" posts on Reddit function like a content mill that Reddit also happens to own and control. And content mills are the inevitable byproduct of any collectively-sourced algorithmic feed: people compete for those pointers, and that competition becomes professional, and suddenly there's barely any room for nodes that aren't specifically engineered to make their way onto those feeds. (You can go further and say that Google itself operates as an algorithmic feed of sorts, which is why content mills have all but destroyed its search results.)

Friendster and MySpace changed the previous dynamics of the web in one subtle but radical way. A MySpace profile was, in a sense, still a series of pointers. But all the pointers were strictly internal: links to photos, songs, "bulletins," and above all the Top 8, which is to say pointers to other people. RSS and Digg and Reddit still opened out onto the web; MySpace opened onto MySpace. And the Top 8 codified, however crudely, the idea that your ultimate power on this new web was to make judgments of other people. (And, inversely, that your own power or powerlessness was based on how other people judged you.)

While MySpace still ultimately revolved around "making a presence," emphasizing your own personal page, Facebook took a leap forward and emphasized actions, again prioritizing dynamic content over static. And it's that synthesis of "online experience centered on yourself as an individual," "action-oriented design," and "self-referencing content" that gives us social media as we know it now. At the time, there was a lot of back-and-forth of Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr innovating new ideas and copying each other's, but it eventually settled into the form we know now: you can share other people's content and add commentary of your own, or you can simply "react," which contributes nothing of substance but is the simplest dynamic action that you can take, meaning it's the easiest one to propagate, meaning it's the thing that most validates our online existence. (And if you don't think that's significant, consider how many of Elon's Twitter-breaking "innovations" have stemmed from blue-check dipshits complaining about not getting enough faves.)

To go back to your original comment, dmh, it's not exactly that the web is no longer about "content and where to find it." It's that "where to find content" has increasingly become less about creating a connected web—discovering things and people, and creating links between your patch of the web and theirs—and more a reflexive, repetitive motion within your social network of choice. "Content" means creating more Feed Units, or reacting to (or voting on) the Feed Units that already exist. "Presence" simply means existing on the feed. The substance doesn't matter, because the only "substance" in a system like this is whether or not the feed approves of you. (This is true even on an "algorithm-less" site like Mastodon or Bluesky: people manually sharing your content is itself a social algorithm.) And because the feed collapses internal and external content into a single unit—or rather, it re-processes external content to turn it into an internal mechanism—there's no getting away from the system. It doesn't matter if you can occasionally inject serendipity or wonder into the feed, because the fact that you've found a way to make the feed display something good, the fact that this only happens if the feed is in fact appeased, means that the feed itself is still the only genuine "content" on display.

That's where the difference between Facebook and Twitter and Reddit and TikTok collapses. The specific form factor matters less than the feedback loop. Whether you create content or consume it or comment on it, whether you're creating material to share on social networks or sticking within social networks, you're reinforcing a specific kind of content. It's onanistic, not in the sense that it's individuals playing with themselves, but in the deeper, more insidious sense that these sites are themselves masturbatory. They only know themselves, can only think about themselves, can only find meaning in that which most looks like themselves.

And what's interesting to me is how much more effective even extremely crude systems are by comparison. MetaFilter is simple as hell, and dysfunctional in lots of ways, but it's still consistently appealing in a way that social media is not. Substack sucks ass, but a lot of writers love it (and I love reading a lot of them) because there're really no mechanics apart from publishing things and choosing what to read. Hell, even if 99% of Reddit is a quagmire of throwaway content, the fact that Reddit is consistently the best place to find answers while Googling comes down to the fact that, even if your hobbyist discussions are taking place on an extremely sub-optimal platform, enough meaningful exchange happens simply through having discussions that the net result is better than the entire rest of Google Search. (And while Reddit largely killed off forums, the handful of forums that I still use feel the same: extremely haphazard, very poorly-designed, but capable of giving me things that social networks simply can't.)

The fact that "who you know" is a modality shared with kleptocracies and corrupt systems is a byproduct, I think, of the fact that people with power in these systems are people who've embraced these systems. They are inherently reactionary by nature, because the nature of reactionary politics is to justify existing structures of power. They either don't understand or don't care that, in order to gain power for themselves, they have to forsake everything that the system doesn't care about. (MrBeast and his insanely algorithm-optimized videos come to mind.)

Similarly to corrupt societies and broken economies, the majority of people opt in out of a combination of convenience, ignorance, and helplessness. Of the people who "strive to succeed," plenty of them operate out of some delusion that quality or substance of some kind will suffice to gain them recognition, or out of the sadder delusion that the system will reward anyone who tries. The ones who are shrewd enough to understand the system's obsession with itself are the only ones who know what success means, or what it would cost; the ones who understand that and proceed anyway are usually the ones who are either cynical enough not to care about what they're perpetuating, or reactionary enough that they sincerely believe they're doing good. And the shrewdest game of all is to invent a new system, a new kind of social media, a new way to lure people into a hall of mirrors while telling them it's progress.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 12:29 PM on July 7, 2023 [24 favorites]

Head of Instagram says:

The goal isn’t to replace Twitter. The goal is to create a public square for communities on Instagram that never really embraced Twitter and for communities on Twitter (and other platforms) that are interested in a less angry place for conversations, but not all of Twitter.

Being better than Twitter is a low bar, though (and gets lower every day).
posted by meowzilla at 12:50 PM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Meta’s Twitter rival Threads explodes to 70 million signups one day after launch
posted by gwint at 2:23 PM on July 7, 2023

Forgive me in advance for taking this extremely astute thing you said and running with it, but as someone who finds social media endlessly fascinating, I think you hit the nail on the head here—and at the same time, how that came to be is itself deeply weird and interesting, and more than a little accidental.

I'm always out of breath and never on time, so I'm glad you ran with it. In appreciation of your kind words I'd like to add that in making the distinction between "what you know" and "who you know", I don't want to reference some sort of dichotomy between a golden age of "meritocracy" and a dark age of "social". That's not been my experience.

I'd like to take the opportunity to underscore that the dichotomy I want to highlight is between the establishment attitude — as represented by Zuckerberg and his Harvard infiltration scheme, as well as the author of the linked Atlantic piece —, that the Internet is or should be about the capture and reproduction of worthy, powerful people, rather than the — IMHO more infectious — idea that the Internet empowers people to create & showcase a plethora of value; that is, to (just) be worthy.
posted by dmh at 2:27 PM on July 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

A couple days in, it doesn’t feel like a new way to do Twitter…it feels like a different way to do Instagram.
posted by Ian A.T. at 8:45 PM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

But more and more I am coming to feel that social media simply does not belong in the hands of for-profit companies....Social media should be government-sponsored.

In the US anyway if there's substantial government funding, unpleasant freedom of speech issues could be raised. I mean right now social media is doing a shit job of blocking harmful speech, but at least there's some minimal incentive in that many major advertisers will balk at overt fascism being intermingled with their beverage ads. But if a site is run by or substantially funded by the government, that eliminates the whole "this is a private site; we can censor who we like" argument that was intermittently used to curb 2020 disinformation, and from there must-carry rules could give even hate groups like the Nazi Party and the Klan major-taxpayer funded presences online.

Plus to me a large part of the problem with social media is how quickly shitty views can propagate and take root. How quickly bad actors can use these sites as an accelerant for toxic ideology. That's still a problem if the Post Office Online is running POOter.

Maybe then, just no large social media of any kind, public or private? (For example) remove the legal protection that any online company with >50,000 users has from liability resulting from false/misleading/harmful information being posted by those users. Then sit back and watch all the large companies get sued to oblivion, leaving only small forums and little federated sites standing when the smoke clears.
posted by xigxag at 9:11 PM on July 7, 2023

Eugen Rochko @Gargron@mastodon.social -

I would prefer it if Elon Musk was destroying his site during the work week. This isn't the first time.

Jul 01, 2023, 15:11

-------

Mastodon went from 1.2M active users last week to 1.8M active users this week. That's not 70M users overnight, but it's something! 🙂

Jul 07, 2023, 19:54

--------

(Rochko = Founder, CEO and lead developer @Mastodon, Germany.)
posted by sebastienbailard at 10:01 PM on July 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

@loquacious I volunteer for that consulting service
posted by oldnumberseven at 10:31 PM on July 7, 2023

Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads
buy a company for far, far more than it's worth and run it into the ground to lure your competitors into a false sense of security making them launch a vaguely similar product so that you can sue them

I'd be okay with Elon winning a man-baby lawsuit where it is declared that he owns the rights to man-babyness and he can endlessly sue other man-babies. It's be a whine-whine.
posted by srboisvert at 5:37 AM on July 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

But Reddit's lineage points directly back to blogging and RSS.

That may be true in terms of how it came about, but how reddit functions owes a lot more to the usenet and fidonet of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the bb cultures and /. of the 2000s than anything else. Metafilter and Kuro5hin and even Plastic are in there somewhere too.
posted by bonehead at 6:12 AM on July 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

Twitter is burning, Bluesky is smug. Where is the best place to do your pathetic doomscrolling?
posted by Artw at 6:28 AM on July 8, 2023

Backstory for Artw's link above. Further reading.
posted by sebastienbailard at 7:33 AM on July 8, 2023

You'd think, after all the conversations about accessibility recently, The Guardian would at least make an attempt at making that cartoon available for everyone.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 8:20 AM on July 8, 2023

And by "recently" I mean the last 15 years.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 8:38 AM on July 8, 2023

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp may need to overhaul how they collect the data of users in Europe after the top EU court ruled against parent company Meta on Tuesday.
posted by Artw at 10:48 AM on July 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

No, they just have to figure out a way to know whether a certain app request to their servers is covered by a restrictive privacy law.
posted by rhizome at 2:47 PM on July 8, 2023

Can Twitter Alternatives Escape the Enshittification Trap?
posted by Artw at 3:22 PM on July 8, 2023

Far-right figures, including Nazi supporters, anti-gay extremists, and white supremacists, are flocking to Threads
posted by Artw at 5:06 PM on July 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

The Trump Twitter knockoff isn't good enough for them?
posted by Flunkie at 5:08 PM on July 8, 2023

can't own libs if there are no libs around to own
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:16 PM on July 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

@davidgerard: lol, Facebook Threads is now protecting Libs Of Tiktok against reports

this means that if it does add activitypub, it'll get fediblocked just for that and never mind all the other reasons

If true that really does effectively end that conversation.
posted by Artw at 6:14 PM on July 8, 2023

Writer Terri Kanefield, who has a law degree and works against disinformation, has a post on Twitter Alternatives: Mastodon, Post.news, Threads, Bluesky, and others for anyone who wants a brief explainer on these alternatives.
posted by Bella Donna at 3:43 AM on July 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm on a Mastodon instance called wandering.shop, aimed at but not limited to SFF writers. No influencers, edgelords, brands or billionaires in sight. It's lovely.
posted by signal at 7:09 AM on July 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

So a major difference between twitter and mastodon for me is the retweeting/boosting culture.

On twitter, I would look at someone's account and see they were retweeting most of the time, and I wouldn't follow them because I felt they were being really lazy and contributing to a culture run amok in a negative direction.

On mastodon, boosting is the only way things find their way out of their home server. Boosting is kindness. Boosting is sharing because you care.

I'm boosting many multiple times more on mastodon than I ever retweeted on twitter.

I like the sharing economy more than the outrage culture.
posted by hippybear at 10:00 AM on July 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

I'm boosting many multiple times more on mastodon than I ever retweeted on twitter.

I like the sharing economy more than the outrage culture.

In the old days (8 months ago) there wasn't as much being posted, the place could seem kind of empty at times, and I would follow and boost pretty in discriminately. Since then it's filled up considerably, and will never be the same again. There's been a couple of shifts in culture like the CW wars and the rejection/acceptance of journa.host that have outright changed the kind of content that is available to share as well, and it's more possible to have the same kind of feed you'd have on Twitter with more of an emphasis on news and activism*.

I'm probably still going to keep following and retooting pretty indiscriminately, though i'll probably continue to lean away from that more twitterish content, or at least maintain a heavy ratio of other stuff. Flooding feeds with aggro just doesn't feel right for the place even if it isn't as devoid of that as before.

* though not mass dunking on idiots, which is a positive thing. There's speculation that its down to the lack of quote tooting but I think its more a cultural thing and having seen what a waste of time that is on the hellsite. other anti-discoverability features probably play a part here too.
posted by Artw at 10:20 AM on July 9, 2023

A very detailed (though work-in-progress) look at the kinds of threats Meta (or any potential bad actor) could pose to privacy on the Fediverse, and some recommendations/suggestions for mitigating those threats. Gets into the nitty-gritty (but not TOO into the nitty-gritty) of how a big corporation like Meta could go about scraping Fediverse instances for content, especially how it might get around obvious countermeasures like IP blocks. Also details some interesting features in Mastodon I didn't know about, but especially other microblogging/social network offshoots in the Fediverse that have cultivated their own features like local-only posting.
posted by chrominance at 11:28 AM on July 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Honestly I think they are less a nonstarter as a federated citizen less because of any special Facebooky bad acting and more it’s going to be one of those instances with a divergent set of moderation styles / set of social goals that nobody wants to federate with, throwing them in with the Gabs and the Truth.social.

Nobody wants to platform libs of TikTok in the bulk of the fediverse as it is today and nobody is interested in federating with anyone who makes up some dumb set of principles that means they can’t not platform LoTT.
posted by Artw at 12:38 PM on July 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Far-right figures, including Nazi supporters, anti-gay extremists, and white supremacists, are flocking to Threads

Imagine the hit to Musk's ego, after everything he's done for them.
posted by clawsoon at 1:52 PM on July 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

It’s like the Little Mermaid song, they want to go where the people are.
posted by Artw at 2:39 PM on July 9, 2023

It’s like the Little Mermaid song, they want to go where the people are.

And also like the Little Mermaid, they'd really like it if women couldn't talk.
posted by clawsoon at 3:38 PM on July 9, 2023 [9 favorites]

Meta's Threads tops 100 million users in under a week

posted by gwint at 6:37 AM on July 10, 2023

I work with activists and content creators. Where should they go?
posted by bq at 8:43 AM on July 10, 2023

Please just join the MeFi instance. It's very nice and the people there follow other nice people, so it's a terrific environment.

Threads is a toxic shitshow. And Bluesky? The Fediverse has 25 times more users than BlueSky.

Contrary to what you have heard, it is not at all difficult to get started and find nice people to follow.

I will help you. MeMail me. Seriously.

Do not sign up for the newest bullshit from Mark from Facebook or Jack from Twitter.

You know better. Honestly.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:05 AM on July 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

Nitter works again
posted by meowzilla at 10:43 AM on July 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

Meta's Threads tops 100 million users in under a week

After a few days of this thing existing and more and more headlines like the above, I'm still baffled. The feed I'm getting is just a wasteland of brands and influencers I mostly don't care about, ranging from pointlessly irrelevant, to actually offensive (e.g. sexist joke meme accounts). Occasionally I do see something I might be kinda interested in (e.g. some museums, probably because I follow a bunch on instagram) sandwiched in there but the content seems to be just social media pandery stuff even for those. It actually seems to get noticeably worse if I reload the feed.

I have no clue why the media keeps talking about this as a plausible twitter replacement, my experience is so different from twitter; is meta really correct that this plausibly what people want out of social media? Well, I guess it may actually be what the brands / influencers want, but why on earth would they expect that someone will want to be on the other side of it? I do get that some people do want infinite scrolling with medium engaging algorithmically chosen content and I don't any more, but this for me has just been bizarrely far from even that.
posted by advil at 10:43 AM on July 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

It’s a VERY impressive metric.

As you say nobody seems to be reporting. Any kind of experience there that translates the metric into anything meaningful.

Also I continue to suspect this is just backdoor leveraging of Instagrams pre existing huge user numbers and the active users would look very different.
posted by Artw at 11:02 AM on July 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

After a few days of this thing existing and more and more headlines like the above, I'm still baffled.

I wonder how much of what people see is derived from their Instagram graph (if they imported it). I have had some crap on my Threads feed, like a bunch of sportsball stuff (muted), influencers (mostly muted or blocked [if grindset, misogynist, the secret types]), and a couple of fash/terf posts (BLOCKED).

But mostly it was mostly initially photographers (landscape & film), since then I've added a few of the current events type people I followed on Twitter as they showed up, assorted Sci-comm and WX accounts + other misc. enthusiasm-specific nerds.

And with very little tailoring (relatively) I have a reasonably reliable feed in terms of the 'push button for dopamine'.

Currently, a lot of it is posts about the Reykjanes volcano eruption.

I have yet to see even one tweet about it (on either timeline), even though I follow like a billion geo-peeps over there.

Not that I wouldn't rather the Fediverse replace all the billionaires' walled gardens, but due diligence and all that. I think Threads probably does have legs, especially if they chuck enough development time at it to get it more feature complete.

Also, Twitter is becoming a ghost town in terms of providing the actual content people used it for.
posted by Buntix at 11:20 AM on July 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Jason Isbell moved over to Threads, so that's something. Unsurprisingly, he's already made a hilarious post about it. Someone sent me a screenshot.

When folks say ‘What about your privacy’ I usually respond with ‘Please watch me and my wife argue on HBO’
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:21 AM on July 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

"Monthly Active Users (MAU)" is the metric that's going to be much more meaningful going forward. If the user experience continues to be what many have described above, I don't see how growth could continue in the long term. However, Meta has said that they are planning on offering chronological feeds, so I do expect the awful firehose that exists now will go away (or be an option like Twitter's "For You" feed)

I think one huge lesson from this is having a one-click onboarding process makes absolutely all the difference. Can you imagine if people could have downloaded a Mastodon client app, import their social graph and start posting in one click? (I understand the reasons why this is next to impossible, and yet...)
posted by gwint at 11:29 AM on July 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

Mastodon's supposed killer feature was that it was decentralized. Which was also the thing that stunted its growth, because when you went to sign up, people made a big deal about which server/instance you joined because it could be blocked and the admins set the rules, you could see only "local" posts, etc.

The normal user does not care about decentralization. Other than my admin telling me about server costs and planned downtime, I rarely interact specifically with people on my instance. There's a "firehose" tab that is just as useless on Mastodon as it would be for Twitter, if it existed.

To its credit, Mastodon made a "default" server in May: Mastodon now has a simpler sign-up process. Old Mastodon users hated that: Default Mastodon servers: so what?
posted by meowzilla at 1:10 PM on July 10, 2023

From Anne Helen Petersen's Culture Study:
When you download Threads — the new, Meta-made Twitter-clone released last week — you’re asked to make a decision that will determine your Threads experience. Do you want to automatically follow all of your Instagram followers? I said yes without thinking. And I’ve been thinking about that decision for the last few days — and how it’s shading my experience (and pretty much everyone else’s).

The existence of the question is what has made Threads so immediately successful: the ability to automatically port follows and followers is novel (at least at this level) and enticing (particularly for anyone who’s tried to make a profile in one of the half dozen other Twitter replacements and found the entire process exhausting). It’s like buying a pre-fab house, or getting one of those overpriced and overpackaged meal kits in the mail. Your meticulously tailored feed is there waiting for you. All you need to do is scroll.

... What’s happening early on with Threads is that these influencers are experiencing their own kind of context collapse, where their vague, sometimes vapid messages are traveling toward a different type of audience. This is pretty much what Threads feels like to me now: a place that’s ostensibly interesting (look, so many people are already here!) but is actually totally boring. It’s “fun,” but definitely not funny — save the people like my friend Katie Notopolous who are shitposting like it’s Twitter and bewildering everyone. It’s not entertaining or clever like TikTok. It’s just new and there, like a bowl of sub-par chips and store-bought guac at a party, asking “Aren’t you hungry? Aren’t you? Aren’t you?”
posted by Bella Donna at 1:16 PM on July 10, 2023

I feel Mastodon's killer feature so far is its stunted growth.
posted by signal at 2:00 PM on July 10, 2023 [6 favorites]

Our modern dilemma.
posted by Artw at 2:09 PM on July 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

When I set up my Threads account, I imported my Instagram follows, but that was pretty irrelevant, since I didn't use Instagram much. It meant I was connected to my sister and brother, and my brother's cat, and not much else. My feed was full of Paris Hilton.

But then I started scrolling through my Twitter feed, and every time I saw someone I wanted to stay connected to, I'd switch back over to Threads and look for them there. The hit rate was amazing. I'd put it about 50%. So about half of the people I cared about on Twitter already had Threads accounts, and that was on day 3, or something like that. They didn't have huge networks -- maybe 150 instead of 5,000 followers, or 10,000 versus the 100,000 they had on Twitter. But they were there, and I could connect to them. That was the important part. I was able to take those steps of reestablishing my network.

I haven't been looking at Threads regularly, but I just now checked in, and all the posts at the top of my feed were from people I followed: Anil Dash, David Hogg, Yashar Ali, The Poynter Institute, The Onion, Bay State Birth Coalition, Seth Abramson, The Brennan Center, Isaac J Bailey. And no Paris Hilton. (I muted her, to be fair.)

There are still a lot of questions, obviously, about moderation, about the algorithms, about privacy and data, and about the claim that they'll support open standards. I have no love of Meta. But as a stopgap, I'm cautiously optimistic. That's very different from the experiences I had on other alternatives.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 7:07 AM on July 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

I’m hearing from a Freud that stuff is getting greyed out on Instagram unless they sign up for either Threads or Meta verified, has anyone else seen that?
posted by Artw at 11:45 AM on July 11, 2023

Hee, Freudian slip!
posted by Pronoiac at 1:20 PM on July 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

friendian slip
posted by RobotHero at 1:34 PM on July 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

I keep reading about the massive numbers of people who are on Threads but man, I looked at it on Saturday night and it was all influencers and celebrities being chummy and none of my friends. I felt like when I was a nerdy kid in junior high hovering around the edge of the party, all arms and legs and exceeding lack of coolness.

This may be a generational thing that we old people don't get but it's not for me. It was not sparking joy, so I deleted the app. I'm glad I reserved my handle. I don't want to have to use it though.

At the same time, I am told that the youngs on AO3 are mad because it's an old-school search system and there is no algorithm. And Tumblr is trying to figure out how to get the youngs to show up with an algorithm, which the olds, both the Gen X and the millennials, are not happy about. So pretty clearly Meta is on to something with the algorithmic feed even if it's not for us old people.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 2:14 PM on July 11, 2023

Kicking the tires on Bluesky, since so many comics folks have ended up there, and I have to say the general app/web experience feels very underdeveloped compared with Masto, particularly if you compare the app with Ivory. Slightly bewildered it’s the thing people have held up as a superior experience.

(The chances of me showing up on Threads remain pretty low)
posted by Artw at 3:50 PM on July 11, 2023

World of Warcraft Has a Lot to Teach the Twitter Clones - Threads and the parade of Twitter rivals can’t dethrone the king, but time and bad management will.
posted by Artw at 7:53 PM on July 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Threads Traffic Dips After Initial Surge in Interest
posted by Artw at 8:36 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

What’s next for Threads - It’s all about retention now, and ActivityPub support is a ‘long while’ off. Also: Facebook hits 3 billion monthly users.
posted by Artw at 10:35 AM on July 14, 2023

Mark Zuckerberg says that tens of millions of people are returning to Threads every day.That’s “way ahead” of what the company expected, he said on Threads. As for what’s coming next, the company is working on “improving the basics and retention” this year, and then “we’ll focus on growing the community.”
posted by Artw at 4:22 PM on July 17, 2023

the company is working on “improving the basics and retention” this year

And I guess that's how Zuckerbot wins. Musk cares about what's on Twitter. Zuckerberg does not care about what's on Threads. He only cares if what's on Threads promotes retention.

A/B test the content. If content A generates more retention and advertiser revenue, users will see more of A. Doesn't matter if it's cat videos or calls for genocide. Zuckerberg don't care, as long as it brings in the money.
posted by clawsoon at 5:16 PM on July 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Bluesky is facing community backlash after letting users register accounts with racial slurs

Hard to get over the impression with Bluesky that I’m watching people make earnest but doomed attempts to establish a community in someone else’s tech demo.
posted by Artw at 11:06 PM on July 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

> Bluesky is facing community backlash after letting users register accounts with racial slurs

"They fixed the technology issue but not the people issue."

Pretty sure they don't want to fix the people issue because it's not a technology issue.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 11:13 AM on July 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Recalling the similar-but-different complaints about prelon Twitter, the people issue would appear to be Jack Dorsey himself. Whatever is actually going on in his head, he doesn't appear to be able to decide whether to cultivate or not cultivate his audience. Call it a drive toward "death of the author" maybe, but his emphasis on "protocol" is a further evasion.
posted by rhizome at 11:49 AM on July 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Whatever is actually going on in his head, he doesn't appear to be able to decide whether to cultivate or not cultivate his audience. Call it a drive toward "death of the author" maybe, but his emphasis on "protocol" is a further evasion.

He's probably trying to recapture the feeling he had when he first released Twitter and it was all about free speech and everybody loved him.
posted by clawsoon at 4:35 AM on July 22, 2023

I appreciate and support the efforts the users of all the different platforms are making to hold administrators responsible for basics like "get rid of Nazis" and "don't put slurs in user names".

What boggles me, though, is how strongly some people identify with whichever platform they picked and sneer at the other ones. I get it about Mastodon; I like it there but I can see that there's an ideological inclination involved for most people. And I get it about Tumblr for similar reasons (there are different ideological subgroups but a lot of "we are Tumblr people").

But the difference between Twitter/Bluesky/Threads/Cohost/Post/etc. all seem cosmetic and somewhat utility-related, as in some of them do one thing better and some do another better. They all seem six of one and half a dozen of the other from a general standpoint, and the interest I have in them is more about where my existing social circles are going to land than which is best or which has the right ideology.

The ideology of all of them seems to be "we want to make money" which is just like everything else on the commercial internet, and a bad way to invest your identity. They're services you pay for in either money or posts (content generation, the draw of your friends wanting to read your musings, whatever) or reading their ads. All of them are for making money, usually VC money, and they're all going to enshittify over time.

I love my friends and family but I can't imagine emotionally investing in one of these services. I use them but they're a means to an end. They're all going to have (serious) problems and they're all going to be long-term ephemeral, like almost everything else on the web. Few, if any, will make it as long as Metafilter already has.

It's a pain in the ass to move platforms and I hate the damage it does to my social web, but it's the people that matter to me, not the platforms.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 7:33 AM on July 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

That sort of side/team choosing is rampant in all sectors. See for example Mac vs PC, Ford vs Chevy, Yankees vs Red Socks, Emacs vs vi, toilet roll over or under, Maple Leafs vs anyone else.

There is something inside us that wants to be associated with brands.
posted by Mitheral at 9:18 AM on July 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

The problem for threads and other Twitter killers is that media sites, governments, Reddit and other information sources continue to use Twitter as a channel for broadcasting information and citing as a primary source for reactions to content or breaking news man on the street stuff. We have to actively work to get people to de-platform Twitter and stop using it for these purposes.
posted by interogative mood at 12:21 PM on July 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

That sort of side/team choosing is rampant in all sectors. See for example Mac vs PC

As a Mac user since the 80s, I'm sadly all too familiar with that brand of tribalism. Maybe I'm an old now, but pick your damn computer/phone by what suits your needs because all of them do mostly the same stuff these days and you can interact (web/documents/messaging/etc.) between the two most of the time. With the exception of a few edge cases, there's not much difference between them. That other people think I'm dumb or whatever because my needs and wants are different to theirs has become a point of real strangeness to me. Same with the platform issue.

I've come to a conclusion over time that one of the factors in social media tribalism is really about politics, which, again, really makes sense for Mastodon/fediverse but other than "I don't want to hang out on the Nazi social media" which seems to be the problem for Twitter, I don't see what the political difference between Threads and Bluesky, for instance, really is. Threads is going to be all about advertising/influencing because it's a Meta project (and some people don't want to use Threads for that reason alone) but Bluesky, if it doesn't die before then, will become all about advertising just like Twitter under Jack did. I guess I don't see for what division the tribes are forming around the newer services other than "I picked this one" and that's one of my sources of bogglement.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 1:10 PM on July 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

We especially need to deplatform Twitter since non-users can't see emergency messages any more.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:50 PM on July 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

Some Twitterer recently said that staying on Twitter now was like hanging out in the high school parking lot after graduation. You know it's not cool anymore, but you haven't figured out where to go next.

Or something like that. I'm paraphrasing with fog brain.
posted by clawsoon at 4:43 PM on July 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

There is something inside us that wants to be associated with brands.

Ugh. No.

There is something inside us that wants to be visibly associated with a tribe and that makes us susceptible to infestation by marketing parasites.

Sometimes those parasites eat our tongues and install themselves instead.
posted by flabdablet at 8:56 PM on July 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

Maybe I'm an old now, but pick your damn computer/phone by what suits your needs because all of them do mostly the same stuff these days and you can interact (web/documents/messaging/etc.) between the two most of the time. With the exception of a few edge cases,

As in Mystery/Machine? Ruh/Roh!
posted by y2karl at 10:00 PM on July 23, 2023

Most of the 100 million people who signed up for Threads stopped using it [arstechnica, 07-28-2023]

Third-party data suggests that Threads may have lost many more than half of its active users. Daily active users for Threads on Android dropped from 49 million on July 7 to 23.6 million on July 14, and then to 12.6 million on July 23, web analytics company SimilarWeb reported.

posted by glonous keming at 11:48 AM on July 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

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