Ask HN: Meta's Threads is dead, isn't it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Meta's Threads is dead, isn't it?

20 pointspaganel23 comments

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SimilarWeb's estimations for traffic (Nov 2023):

twitter.com: Total Visits 5.9B

threads.net: Total Visits 50.1M

bsky.app: Total Visits 27M

truthsocial.com: Total Visits 4.6M

mastodon.social: Total Visits 3.5M (for reference, this is just one instance)

(visits ~ user sessions)

What would the total visits for ALL mastodon instances (including things like truth social) be? Any way to calculate that?

I just manually looked up these domains, like this: https://www.similarweb.com/website/mastodon.social/#overview

You can find a list of mastodon instances by activity and look up top 20 domains yourself if you are not lazy :)

~10M isn’t an unreasonable amount considering most mastodon users have an account on a small handful of default servers

mastodon.social averages 1.5 visit per second?

3500000/30/24/60/60.

That seems low.

SimilarWeb's visit = multiple pageviews:

>Similarweb calculates a visit (session) for a website when a visitor accesses one or more pages. Subsequent pageviews are included in the same visit until the user is inactive for more than 30 minutes. If a user becomes active again after 30 minutes, that counts as a new visit. A new session will also start at midnight.

https://support.similarweb.com/hc/en-us/articles/212999769-T...

I don't have a dog in this fight, other than being invested in FB via index funds, so technically yes but not really because they're index funds, but what's with the loaded question? A very similar AskHN came up a few weeks ago. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife yet" of Internet platforms. Does Netcraft also confirm they're dying?

Don't know what Netcraft is, saw a mention of Threads on some reddit sub just before posting this and I realised that I had forgotten about them and about their existence, even though they had all the might of Meta the company behind this project.

It is a "loaded" question in the sense that it's good to see that a member of the tech oligopoly has a big miss like this one, on that you're right.

Meta can afford to keep Threads on life support forever. I use Threads daily and it's active and informative for me. It's not as good as Twitter, but much better than X for my uses.

The Twitter diaspora will never be as consolidated or powerful as they were on the platform they emigrated from.

it's certainly not as popular as I'd presumed it was going to be. I was on it for a while but didn't have the same level of engagement with it as I had with twitter, it was a much quieter place. I presumed it was just because twitter had managed to turn everyone off the idea of that level of engagement, but I then set up accounts on Mastodon and BlueSky, and between the two found almost everyone I'd valued on twitter. Bluesky's UI is rubbish but its nice to be able to have conversations again

Not as dead as Mastodon.

Given that Threads' purpose was to pull the rug under the feet from Twitter, while the Elon takeover saga was ongoing, Threads has failed achieving that objective.

Long term, we'll see how serious Meta is in _growing_ Threads. There is opportunity but as r721 posted, Threads is less than 10% of what Twitter/X is today.

Less than 1% even.

There seem to be a decent number of people who regularly use Threads, especially among people who are Instagram-first for their social media.

It seems to be far less dead than Mastodon and Blue Sky, anyway.

I think it has a chance, Elon is constantly in the news for being offensive, and every time it's like an ad to move over to threads. In the meantime threads is getting better.

it was released less than a year ago, these things take time to build traction, the initial downloads was because it was linked to instagram and easy to quickly setup. Seems it gets the people who're already on insta but not willing to engage in twitter

Unavailability in Europe is also an important factor, I think. At least that's what people mentioned in my Twitter timeline. This will soon change though:

>Threads will finally be expanded to users in the European Union on December 14th

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/8/23993595/threads-meta-eu-...

It was never alive, just a marketing stunt

Something that the product teams at Meta (and others) need to understand, that Zuckerberg knows to be true, is they cannot actually compete long term with free speech.

The main problem is this quasi-human mostly-automated moderation system to appease advertisers rightfully concerned their product ads being served along side Nazi rhetoric or something similarly vile.

But I think that moderation is actually artificially driven by legacy print and television media corporations desperately clinging to straws as technological advancements disintermediates their influence on the people. Legacy media is directly threatened by social media platforms, so it's not a surprise they're incentivized to call into question the content itself. Every ad dollar not being spent by social media platforms is a potential dollar being spent on legacy media platforms.

The thing is adults prefer to use a social network that treats adults like an adults, rather than a children. It doesn't take a genius to see Threads is for children and the adults are hanging out on X. The problems of advertising on X are almost certainly temporarily and can be resolved much quicker than the network effect.

cheap copycat. As for Bluesky created too much hype and exclusivity that people gave up. got a notification last week inviting me to join and lol'd. kinda like magicleap with vr.

I wonder how much customer confidence was lost with Jack Dorsey effectively abandoning Blue Sky for Nostr right at the time Blue Sky started gaining traction.

Eh, it doesn't seem that dead to me. I do see a decent number of posts from folks with the same interests there, as well as a fair few reactions on each of my own posts. It's about the same number as on BlueSky, and maybe about half what I'd get on a popular Mastodon post.

However, it's certainly less active than it used to be, and in my opinion, that's true of most other social media services nowadays as well. Feels like the end result of Twitter's decline is less 'people are going to alternative services' and more 'people are moving away from the microblogging format altogether'.

No, but I think there's tons of bots there. My dad signed up for it because the media told him this is the way to defeat Elon Musk and is now obsessed with it. rolls eyes

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