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Comment by HamptonFounders | Hacker News Reader

I keep saying it's not actually a Twitter alternative - that's a marketing ploy. But Threads doesn't have DMs (by far the most important Twitter feature for any user of that platform).

The whole Twitter thing is just PR.

To me, the real story is the use of ActivityPub - the decentralized protocol that powers Mastadon.

I feel like I haven't been able to nail down whether Threads uses it (I've seen sources say definitely yes, and definitely no) but to me, THAT would be the only reason to launch this thing.

Not to eat Twitter's lunch, but to be the first major player into DeSo

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> But Threads doesn't have DMs (by far the most important Twitter feature for any user of that platform).

... Eh?

I was a heavy Twitter user from 2007 to the ascension of naughty ol' mr car. I think I maybe sent ten DMs, ever. I don't think it even had them for years after launch.

Like I don't doubt that they're important to some people, but this seems like weird positioning.

As far as I can tell they don’t have support for activity pub but they say it’s coming and they’re working on it. Will they actually do it? Hard to say.

I’m pretty confident they will, if only to cooperate with the EUs digital markets act.

Yeah that's interesting though because there are a lot of other rules they'll need to follow in order to comply with the new regulations. So it's gonna be interesting to see how they approach it. It's also going to be interesting to see how the fediverse will respond to this because it would be such an outlier in terms of size and resources.

I think most instances will just have to block it, honestly. Unless it... provides fediverse access only to well-behaved accounts or something? This _could_ work, but would be a pretty bizarre user experience.

Assuming it just federates as-is, though, I don't think it'll last a day on most instances.

Yeah but how do you even define well-behaved? That can become complicated real fast. My bet is that they'll just allow people to follow an account using the classic @username@threads.net and they'll allow for export of the content and that's about it.

Is that part of DMA compliance? If so, then what about Facebook itself?

Yeah, I'm watching this with great interest.

lol... well here's one opinion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36669480

Why do you say DMs are by far the most important feature? Lots of other services provide DMs besides Twitter, and I would not say it is the key thing that makes Twitter what it is. At least for myself, in a dozen years on the platform I used DMs only a small handful of times.

Maybe this is different depending on what industry you're in - but for a lot of people in my circle (tech/startup media), the incredible thing about Twitter is that you can DM almost anyone.

I've connected with so many people there.

There's also a culture of DMing there, where your messages have a higher likelihood of getting replied to than other places like LinkedIn.

I didn't use DMs for years. And also wasn't a big Twitter person at all. So I get it. But that all changed a few years ago, and now, I'm tellin ya' - the only feature that matters there is the DMs.

> the incredible thing about Twitter is that you can DM almost anyone.

I can't imagine having open DMs. I've tried that, and ugh, the unsolicited messages from strangers were terrible.

See, this is the fascinating thing about Twitter; it's so incredibly compartmentalised (or at least _was_; as another article posted here recently went into some detail on, recent changes have tended to break this). I had no idea this was even a thing; in my former Twitter circles this behaviour (unsolicited) would've largely been considered pretty rude, and in any case it's not clear why anyone would want to do it.

I have never sent or received a DM on twitter

> DMs (by far the most important Twitter feature for any user of that platform).

That's incorrect. Also Threads is currently a MVP, and will quickly iterate to meet users demands. It can afford to quickly iterate as it's a small team that built a codebase from the ground-up. Unlike Twitter, which is saddled in a swamp of legacy where everything they touch... something breaks.

Are DMs really an important feature? Granted I'm not a heavy Twitter user, but I have never sent or read a single DM. For all I know there are unread DMs sitting in my account, I would never open or read one anyway.

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