Too late, IMO. The invite-only system meant that the "leave Twitter" crowd split between Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon. IMO none of them have ended up being great replacements.
Someone please explain how a social network is supposed to succeed when it's invite-only? Hype alone won't carry it.
IMO, being invite-only is THE reason Google+ failed. There were so many memes about people getting excited for an invite, getting on, and then finding only a couple people they knew were on it, if any at all.
For a social network to work, it needs to be a network. Limiting on-boarding eliminates the network, and so people lose interest fast.
It may be that the industry has evolved to a degree that this is no longer viable (I also don’t know if I believe this…), but invite-only or otherwise limited launches formed the backbone of the current web.
Facebook was only available if you had a school address. Gmail was only available via invite. Obviously a service can’t stay in a limited state forever and the hype will run out, but it’s not exactly a new approach to limiting access early in the life of a service.
Google+ failed because Google killed it. I never experienced what you describe, but admittedly got an invite very early, and interacted with people who had also gotten the same thing.
Limiting onboarding does not eliminate the network. It just limits it. Again, to your point, this can’t last forever, but is not by itself the issue as long as they continue to scale up access. There are plenty of other issues that will make or break a network.
Bsky is the same; there's unexplainable pressure I feel in there to keep it to an in-group of nicest of people, but fine. It's not derailing into a Mastodon.
IMO Twitter was a very compelling place to be during a breaking news event (and I don’t just mean political news, could be cultural, sports etc) and none of the alternatives have replicated that yet. Mastodon is maybe not even technically capable of it (because federation introduces a delay in message delivery).
I do enjoy niche discussions on Mastodon but once you’ve removed time as an influential factor for importance the default chronological view doesn’t feel anywhere near as to me.
The man has enough access to capital and can easily hire folks with the know-how to make a service that can scale. That fact that this hasn't happened says something.
So if you believe that it's fair to say that "people actually use Mastodon" (which has 1.5 million MAUs), then yes — people actually use Threads.
I felt like I had discoverability issues with Mastodon, and the culture I kept running into there was abrasive. It's all around much better now than it was years ago, and I do seem to get more engagement from strangers than on any of the other networks, but I struggled to stay interested.
Bluesky reminded me of the kind of slower organic growth that you'd typically find in earlier internet communities. The absence of videos and GIFs is, for me, an enormous positive point that I know will eventually give way to popular demand. I like that it's more text-and-images focused, and it seems to be in my sweet spot in terms of... most of what I see feel like thoughtful posts and replies, and not people nakedly building their personal brand.
None of them are going to have the same social cachet as Twitter. It's pretty incredible to see someone spend billions of dollars to completely squander an ecosystem an internationally recognizable brand like that. A fairly unique resource, obliterated by a man-baby with absolutely no concept of the value of the people on the platform he bought.
For now, it's the most viable alternative for Twitter - for now.
But this is in part because Mastodon UX is very complicated for beginners, and BlueSky is slow as hell to make improvements. It still doesn't support sending videos...
And it has reached the #1 position in most of the App Stores around the world.
Is it really no. 1 or nearby on Android ?