Instagram Threads passes 10M users in seven hours
threads.net
threads.net
Start with 2.35B users.
> Start with 2.35B users.
I mean it is funny but I don't recall seeing anything on Instagram about threads. iirc, the first time I read about threads was on techmeme a few days ago when it became available for 'pre-order' on the apple app store.
- Non-chronological home feed (to force-feed ads & gate-keep influence)
- Nerf users' reach to force them into buying ads
- Perpetual PII data-gobbling
- Draconian account control rules (to pad user numbers?...hmmn)
Brands seem incredibly enthusiastic to be there though, signifying they were just waiting for something like this to jump onto and away from Musk.
Whatever I search for does not match the content on any tweet equivalent either the text or meta information - like hashtags. Only the content of the users name and words in their Bio.
This I can understand for instagram where the concept is based on a stream of pictures that will be released over time. But how do I find within content ? - like breaking news items?
Beyond duplicating the accounts you follow in instagram. This only serves to find and follow accounts built around a single concept. Or a named celebrity.
But it does not work at the moment as a tool to find anything based on the content within a thread (happening now, or around me, or an upcoming event or a specific programming code example) - isn't this the main value of these kind of tools? Find content that is important or interesting to you and then follow them to hear more.
Am I missing something fundamental?
Google once introduced a social network called Google+, and guess what, billions of users were ‘signed up’ overnight by virtue of already having Google accounts. And it meant nothing. That’s the extreme end of the scale, where the user doesn’t even know they signed up. I’m guessing Meta’s 10m figure is not that meaningless (otherwise it would be “2.35bn users in 1 ms”) but what is it exactly?
It looks fine, but there's a HUGE BUT... it's an algorithmic feed and as far as I can tell, I can't change that. It's full of boobs and butts and celebrities. I can't find any easy/obvious way to change my feed into something that resembles just the people I want to follow. I use Twitter to learn and find things that are interesting. Using Tweetdeck means I can avoid all the worst parts of Twitter, and the algorithm. It looks like I can't do that on Threads, at least not now.
And there's not a web app.
I assume those things will change, but right now, it's not for me.
A junior dev could build a working twitter clone in a couple weeks; tech was never Twitter's moat.
Twitter had a first mover advantage and got the community of microbloggers. Mastodon and now threads aren't going to fully coopt that community -- And they need to fully coopt it to win.
There are too many people who won't touch a Facebook product with a 10-foot pole(Myself included), so there's a whole group of users, especially academics and technologists, who will never seriously use threads
I really expected we'd end up going towards a standard with various clients.
Instead this.
Honestly, at this stage I don't think the existence of two standards is all that bad?
(If in 10 years half the world is on ActivityPub and the other half is on the Bluesky thing, that might be annoying, granted, but this early on multiple standards is kind of expected)
And that's the problem with end-stage capitalist thought. Mastodon isn't trying to "win". Never has been.
Mastodon was all about creating a non-commercial community of people talking with each other. It was done so to prevent the inexorable enshittification process of a for-profit social network that must raise the walls of communication higher and higher to extract smaller slices of profit.
But no, Mastodon does not "need" to win. We're not even playing the same game. Winning in our collective cases is being able to talk with friends without being psychological-advert games, fuckyoupayme demands, bulk selling data to anyone who pays, forced viewing of advertiser content, or a multitude of new scams made by the advertiser committees.
And threads.net is still unblocked at my instance. We're waiting to see how it's going to play out. If they somehow, some way, actually act like a proper steward of the fediverse, I wouldn't mind talking with their users over federation. But if they allow or otherwise enable the wasteland facebook has created, fediblock'em.
Aren't we over saying things like that? That's Dunning-Krueger speak. The bits that you see as a user are just the tip of the iceberg required to support hundreds of thousands of tweets per minute that Twitter currently is capable of.
Real life is not a white board design interview.
Still, is that the fastest yet? Instagram took 2.5 months for reaching 1M users while it was 5 days for ChatGPT.
Somebody called it out on HN already that Twitter is going away because of Threads. Monopoly is never good, especially not in social media business. There should never be one social network to rule them all.
It seems severely early to say this especially when threads is such a barebones and incredibly unwieldy experience that seems to have been rushed out to capitalise on twitter's fumbles.
There's no "Following" timeline at all, you cannot mute accounts that you do not follow (only block), the video player is somehow worse than Instagram's, the UX is buggy and kind of awful, the algorithmic feed is desperately trying to focus on your particular region rather than even try to attempt your interests, things are tightly coupled with your Instagram profile and so on. This is also not even going into the nightmare that are the privacy settings which will probably prevent an EU launch for quite some time.
It feels to me that the "low" barrier of entry of simply having an Instagram account is enough to sign up for this which makes joining much more low effort since most people interested in this already had one. I'm not sure this is going to kill twitter so easily. Unless their velocity of improvements is significantly improved and they take the right feedback, this is probably going to be a flash in the pan.
Though I will say, if they somehow bring Japanese Twitter over to Threads by courting J-Pop artists, vtubers, mangaka etc, that will truly be the death knell for twitter.
If my impression of Instagram is representative then 80% of the 2B+ user base is bots.
The worst case here is Meta start automatically forcing Threads down Instagram user's throats if they don't get the levels of signup their revenue forecasts demand. That would be annoying, Twitter is a cesspool and I think Threads has the potential to be the the detritus of that.
If this is USA-only they could at least mention on the webpage. But now this looks like a really weird failure mode of a launch.
Is it Apple Maps bad? -Gavin Belson
Is it Bard bad?
But if they can get 50% of Twitter's (remaining) BRANDS to switch where they spend ad dollars, that's a win for FB!
This is exactly what a serious Twitter alternative is supposed to be. We don't need to wait long for this to surpass the entire population of the 'Fediverse', but again this growth is not a surprise but excepted.
At the point, Threads is the Fediverse, and it cannot be stopped. Either federate with Threads or stay irrelevant. But either way, LLaMa is going to get trained on Threads and the smaller fediverse.
Interested to see what numbers (and stickiness) is like in a few months.
If it was empty you'd probably just go "meh" and close the app.
This is about network effects, hype, getting famous people to use, etc. I doubt it's meant to be anything better than Twitter.
I have low expectations and I'm not the target audience but I fail to see how they should have done this differently.
Previous submissions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=true...
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This may be because of a technical error that we're working to get fixed. Try reloading this page.I installed Threads on my iPad but don't have Instagram installed there (Instagram is on my phone). Threads needs to be on the same device as Instagram. I was expecting to be able to log in with my Instagram credentials, not log in with the Instagram app.
There is no question of it now.
And mastodon.social and other big Mastodon instances will allow it.
That remains to be seen.
I think you will find that Meta will chuck N amount of money to make it happen with some of the Mastodon admins.
And if you don't like it, you can move to another smaller instance, however that said instance may not federate with Threads, otherwise setup your own (unlikely anyone other than techies will do this)
On every single threads.net profile, for example zuck.
"Soon, you'll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, such as Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, such as @zuck@threads.net."
mastodon.social and other instances have signed an NDA and have not denied federating with Threads.
Until they offer an option for people not willing to share their daily step count with Meta — and let's face it, in the age of surveillance capitalism and Meta going down the tubes, that's not likely, — it's a hard no from me.
Ugh. Was this supposed to be better than what Twitter has become?