Threads Is Now Live
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Interface is clean and easy to use/intuitive
Not seeing an ad or sponsored posts every 2nd or 3rd story is refreshing, wondering how long that lasts
No web app to boot ? Wtf disappointed no web ui yet but hoping that changes and changes soon
Also no other way to login apart from instagram ? That’s strange , was hoping for standalone login , hoping it’s eventually rolled out
No way to change username even after linking instagram username, this is imho a dumb move, I was late to the instagram party and missed out on shorter username and now was hoping joining threads early would help me get my desired username but alas
I noticed the highlighted replies feature where celebrity replies are expanded below some threads , it’s probably a good feature just feel they could have a way of turning it off, I’d rather click into a story to surface those and maximize stories per page and reduce scrolling
All in all seems like a decent twitter clone, and lots of features missing but definitely a good start.
There is a 1:1 mapping of Instagram <-> Threads user names, so even if they let you change it in the app you wouldn't be able to get a shorter one if someone has already claimed it on Instagram.
I f'ing hate typing on my phone compared to on my computer. Definitely a necessary feature for me.
- The app is very clean. Black text on white background. Only the bare minimum functionality – post threads, follow accounts, see a single (algorithmically curated) feed. Not flashy, no ads. Of course chances of it staying this way are close to zero.
- There is no "trending" section, which is surprising. You'd think that was one aspect of Twitter they would have copied first. Or maybe they are waiting to introduce it over the coming days once there are more users.
- They managed to pre-seed a ton of content from celebrities and other top Instagram accounts, so even on day 0 with a brand new account you start with a full feed and the place seems "alive".
- App is handling the incoming load like a champ. Everything loads with no perceptible lag, even though I'm sure it is getting hammered from every angle right now. This is where the backing of Meta engineering shines (over Twitter/Bluesky/Mastadon etc. which have all struggled to stay up lately).
- There isn't Fediverse support yet but your profile does show which server you belong to (right now threads.net by default), which is pretty neat.
Any stability issues on mastodon.social are noteworthy, but it's important to recognize that it only represents 1,370,000/9,930,000 = 13% of total users, and 387,000/1,790,000 = 21% of Monthly active users.
If you don't use Mastodon, it might be easy to assume that the experience would be filled with blackouts or technical issues, but that's not true. If "picking a good server" sounds difficult, check out Mastodon's server page, and hopefully you should find one that fits your interest [3].
Don’t get me wrong, I say that as someone who likes Mastodon and many of its ideas. My only gripe is a lack of focus on privacy - the fediverse makes everything overly public.
https://www.threads.net/t/CuVlg88I84C/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ...
Deep pockets also help.
Seems like a cold start problem. I'd expect recommendations in general to improve soon.
It's interesting to me how dismissive people are of Mastodon, when it's basically been perfect for me.
I enjoyed Jeff Atwood's post on the matter [1].
> People say "decentralization doesn't work as good as the centralized facebooks and twitters", but then I post here on highly decentralized Mastodon a silly little joke about the commando character in the old video game Command & Conquer from 1995 and get a response from someone who worked on the original game! .. uh, maybe it is working already?
Mastodon doesn't need perfect scalability and uptime to be better than Threads. Instead, it succeeds by aligning the platform's values with the user's, by not treating the user as a product to monetize.
[1] https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror/110656567413673113
I'm really curious as to what the current operating costs are.
The defensiveness is off-putting. Almost like a cult slogan. I'm glad folks are enjoying Mastodon, and there's obviously users on it! Threads claims plans to federate with Mastodon after all.
Note that this is deeply worrying to a lot of Mastodon users. There's the fear that this is an embrace-extend-extinguish type move. Only time will tell.
I hate that computer has become a second tier citizen. My phone is a great little computing device, but my computer is an even better, large, comfortable, multitasking, ergonomic computing device.
That’s why even things with web or desktop UIs will try to goad you into installing the mobile app.
Look at the list of collected data for Threads in the iOS App Store. It’s basically “everything conceivable as much as possible.”
Your data isn’t valuable because your life is special and interesting. It’s valuable because it helps micro-target ads at you.
Otherwise I'm not impressed. I don't try and hide myself from Facebook/Twitter much, but the first keeps trying to sell me Viagra and shirts for fat guys and the second thinks I'm every kind of doctor at the same time.
A new low-cost airline just launched in Australia. The only way to book? By installing their app...
I am not sure how the non-tech masses book their trips, but I usually have a dozen tabs open, comparing prices and flight times across a range of aggregators/airlines.
Even if I know which airlines I am flying I often have several tabs open to compare prices across dates.
All of this is not possible with an app.
By either calling (you have a phone in your hand, after all) the airline or their favorite travel agency, or using the application.
I know a guy who flies around frequently for both business and pleasure. The most he does is check Experia; usually he just books flights via the airline's application (made even easier because he's a frequent flyer).
>I hate this new trend with a passion.
20/20 hindsight says it was inevitable. Microsoft was too early and too innovative to the party with Windows 8, but otherwise they were right in judging that the desktop was on its way out from the front seat.
For the vast majority of people, a phone has more computer than they would know what to do with.
My non techie friends and family do everything on their phone. From my teenage nieces and nephews, to my 75 year old parents and in laws, they are far far far more comfortable on phone, which they feel they understand, than on a computer, which they feel is scary and mysterious and dangerous. (I'm not saying I agree with that ; that's just a perception we have groomed in them).
They do their banking and purchases and mortgages and trips on a teeny little screen, even teenier keyboard. And here's the thing, they're good at it. It works! Vast majority of time they accomplish what they want effectively and efficiently. Turns out I'm a massive exception. I just feel claustrophobic and enclosed and uncertain without my computer which is my comfort zone.
I have a friend in royal Bank of Canada and they have terminology for that - I forget the details but it's something like shoulders down vs shoulders up. They have detailed stats on what are peoples preferences in doing stuff on phone vs computer. Apparently in Canada people do vast majority on phone except in usa. Apparently that makes Canadians odd - they say Americans and a lot of world does their mortgages on phone too. I found that shocking until I realized my wife and sister do too
I've seen notifications in Instagram saying "Your friend X just posted for the first time in Threads" this is JUST what I did not want, to have both things linked, my Twitter is silly I don't want my family or old friends to follow me there.
Conversely, semi-public figures like journalists or CS researchers might not want people to follow them on Threads so that people don't immediately find their Instagram account (I believe you can still keep that private and have to manually approve followers, though).
The criticism that I would have here is that Threads lacks this multi account UX, so you would have to log out and in again until they add that.
Majority of people use their phone for this, and that’s who they’re targeting.
https://www.threads.net/t/CuVZfoihkcF
Text follows for those without the app, RT from Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram (original tweet from Jesse Chen):
FYI for everyone, we’ve set our rate limits to “generous” bc we believe you have the right to see more than 600 posts in a day here.
if you encounter a rate limit block and you’re not a scraper, please let us know. thanks!
> Anyone think this can become bigger than twitter!?
> It'll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn't nailed it. Hopefully we will.
My experience: The algoritm is terrible for me because it higly bias you towards the language of the country you are residing and not the system language. As a Brazilian the only posts I see are from "blue checkmarks" ex-reality TV show people who think they are funny. In every thread blue ticks all over the top, in a cronological order of replies, which means famous people who put the lowest effort will show first.
I don't get it, if my system language is in English why show only (Portuguese) Brazilian language? So if I travel or live abroad how would that work?
Twitter has gotten worse lately, blue sky isn’t open to the public, and I don’t care about federation so threads seems pretty nice to me.
Note they are rolling it out by country, maybe because they need per-language mod teams.
right now, seeing them both together makes me not wanna sign in again
The other reasons for it are:
- most users are not power users and don't follow a lot of people, but still want to see content
- a true chronological timeline would include bad posts (an acquaintance who spams or mass-RTs annoying content) and misses good ones (important life updates from your friends 12 hours ago)
If you publicly announce that making an app is easy and could be done with a fraction of the engineers when you buy it, perhaps it’s unsurprising when a competitor decides that they should make the same app to take your revenue? After all, if it’s so easy to do, maybe it’s the next thing you should do.
Links work in posts (big for Instagram!)...... but no hashtags? Killing any sort of 'network spread' which is a big deal for conversations greater than just your follows. Something that holds back fediverse and keeps people on twitter is network effects (pros and cons when it comes to promotion of course)
Tried a video post and it removed sound/doesn't play properly.....kinks.
Kinda wish it would show all my instagram posts automatically in my feed but I guess that's asking alot. The duplication is just a chore tho if that's what everyone ends up doing.
Anyways, it's something.
The hint in the opening launch screens about the fediverse is definitely interesting (because we know everyone on the other side of that is fuming/blocking). This is a big play. And despite it not being exactly what the mastodon/fediverse heads wanted, it seems like a move in that direction even if it is a big whale jumping in the water with a centralized server vibe.
What's big about this to me and why I'm even paying any attention to it at launch is the fact that it will immediately have millions of accounts ready to go because of the instagram porting. That's big right out of the gate. None of that mastodont 'what server do I choose', new address account creation, no name squatting etc to worry about. It's go time. Big play outta Meta which I'm curious how fast it all came together when it's not really that much to it. Let's build a twitter clone and use all the IG accounts. Done.
They also need to let us change display names; these usernames don't tell us very much. Also, a following-only feed would be great.
But the feed’s are loading slowly, I’d imagine that will be smoothed out though.
I can’t figure out how to follow or find fediverse accounts..? How does this work?
It doesn't (yet). Fediverse compatibility will launch "soon" (https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/adam-mosseri-says-metas-th...).
- Migrating profile and social graph from Instagram is frictionless.
- Federation is not enabled, and my guess is it’s disabled last minute, bc when you type <at>id<at>server, the first <at> is deleted in your post completely.
- The visibility control is different from most ActivityPub implementations like Mastodon and etc, but more like Twitter’s . Kinda makes sense from business perspective, but will be tricky to see how this works across federated ActivityPub servers.
[1] https://www.threads.net/t/CuVY5CAvfTS/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ...
I understand Meta isn’t amazing. I’m looking for Twitter from two years ago: somewhat moderated and working. They’ll give me that here.
Not _super_ happy that the front page is pulling from people I don't care about but kind of expected. Curious how it'll adapt once people I want to follow start producing... threads?
I'm also kind of surprised they added quote RTs. That's a pretty combative feature.
For what's essentially a list of text.
Meta should have enough resources to hire a couple iOS and Android devs to make a native experience. The hard parts are all on the backend.
[1] https://www.threads.net/download
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instagram....
Rethread (retweet), thread (twitter) feed, etc.
Having a catchy name is among the most important steps to success.
This is how you do a proper launch with very fast 'adoption' and an extremely smooth transition with little downtime. Obviously executed to perfection by no-one else but Meta Platforms. The one who's stock was once predicted right here to go to $0 because of its chaotic stock price drop, and is now celebrated with potentially finding another billion users out of Threads. It made no-sense to bet against Zuck like they did when the stock went down.
But this actually destroys the smaller social networks before they even had a chance to grow such as Substack Notes, Post, SPILL, T2, Mastodon, hive.social and cohost.org. They all need money to stay online and Meta has the money to sub-plant them all or buy out the largest networks. Money is power.
We'll see how this goes, but there is a pattern with Meta's photocopying machine which didn't kill Snap with Stories, and didn't kill TikTok with Reels. They will co-exist but there will be no immediate Twitter 'death' anytime soon, especially this year.
Just running the huge risk of getting broken up due to anti-trust and anti-competition laws by the regulators. (Unless they use ActivityPub as the argument that there is no lock-in on Threads)
But as always, Instagram's (Threads) success on ActivityPub is indeed a nightmare for the Fediverse as centralization come up on top.
Either way, a great move by Zuckerberg once again.
Snap and TikTok weren't busy trying to kill themselves, though.