Meta Threads engagement has dropped 50% in a week
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/meta-threads-engagement-dropped-red-hot-debut-tracking-firms-say-rcna94256Open linkView original on lemmy.world1678
Comments259https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/meta-threads-engagement-dropped-red-hot-debut-tracking-firms-say-rcna94256Open linkView original on lemmy.world
Typical fear of missing out behavior. Folks flock to Threads to see what it's all about, see that it actually sucks, and bail.
Yeah FOMO is a helluva drug. I'd be willing to bet that while there are plenty of users on the newplaform, people actually posting is not there yet, and with the lack of content for users to doom scroll they're hopping back to whatever app they came from. Most people don't give two shits about actually engaging with a given userbase, they just want to doom scroll content and zone out.
Why did they start calling it "Doom scrolling?"
It's generally when you're stuck in a loop of reading negative posts/articles. I think the phenomenon comes from how when you read a negative article/piece of news you feel down, so you want to scroll further in the hopes of seeing something positive to lift your spirits. But then of course it's only more negativity, and so you keep going. And the algorithms of Twitter/Facebook knows this, so they don't tend to help you find something positive.
Nothing positive is needed. It's an outrage engine that keeps you involved by edging on the max level of disturbance you are comfortable to consume. Seeing, posting reactions, having likes enables you to keep it going.
That's fair, I don't partake in that side of the web myself but when I get stuck in it it's usually because I read something depressing and am scrolling desperately hoping for good news.
Meta could learn a lesson or two in edging 😉
I think alot of it relates to just scrolling through news and wanting more content/headlines. It's not that users are necessarily seeking out bad news or "doom", it's just that, given the state of the world today , that's what a lot of the news ends up being. I think I often engage in "doomscrolling", but I'm not doing it because I want to see bad news, I'm an information addict and I'm just trying to get as much content as I can. Reddit fed that habit well, but I've moved on from there. And it's not necessarily a bad thing if Lemmy can't feed that addiction, not seeing new content pushes me off and forces me back into the real world or on to other sites/apps. I'm fine with that, I hated my constant need to flip through Reddit whenever I was bored before.
It's been a thing for a while, basically just mindlessly scrolling for hours on end on a neverending feed
I prefer Doom Metal.
Covid era when many people had nothing to do, were more worried and anxious than usual, and the internet seemed full of concerning and bad news. The term has never meant that much to me personally. I’ve only regular scrolled.
I also think that there were linch pins with in the threads app, people followed shadow accounts for there friends etc. Now I wouldn't be surprised if alot of those friends then didn't get the app, making said shadow follow pointless
I wouldn't say its FOMO, I think most people just had higher hopes for it as a direct Twitter replacement instead of the cesspool of reposters, uninteresting celebs, and wylin' out social media managers that it serves up in its feed. I don't mind Meta, I don't mind that they want to eventually federate, I just wish the feed wasn't pure trash.
All the celeb shit is the number 1 reason I always hated these platforms. I also feel like the only people somewhat defending twitter are those with a large following/celebrity status
That could be I guess.
What you described isn't FOMO, that's just curiosity. Just checking out a new popular app and then just not using it due to a lack of engagement.
In other news lemmy engagement is up 200% on the week
Don't fact check me I pulled this out my ass
Fact checked. Your ass contents appear to be statistically correct.
I checked his ass. It indeed is empty now so he did recently pull something out.
that's some serious
good-ass newsgood ass-newsRelevant XKCD - https://xkcd.com/37/
lemmy doesn't have this kind of data because we don't have the zucc in our asses.
They gave up all their personal data to see a crappy algo-driven social media site. Meta still considers this a win.
What new personal information did meta get from Instagram users enabling threads?
The real answer is nothing, assuming they already had an Instagram account. People are all up in arms, but the majority of 'signups' were just people clicking the activation button as opposed to creating a new account.
That said, I currently will praise anything that takes more users away from Twitter. Lesser of two evils and all that.
Not that I disagree much, but... what a world we live in where Meta is the lesser of two evils...
Well, that’s enough internet for today, day drinking anyone?
🍻
Day dosing more like it.
I’d argue Meta takes the cake just with Cambridge Analytica in terms of damage. Let alone all the other shit. But yeah, choose between ebola and the black plague…
Plus, Elon is more likely to run Twitter into the ground than Zuck is Meta, so that alone makes Meta the bigger threat.
I agree, it’s amazing. Musk has been such a dumbfuck that he has managed to make Mark Zuckerberg look good by comparison.
As LTT said. Threads is the result of the Zuck flicking his tongue out and tasting blood.
But I mean we (society, not me, miss me with that) are still clearly subscribing to a social media site run by the lizard people and calling it an improvement.
Which says a lot.
You have to have blood to be a lizard. That man is as organic as my Playstation
And, unless your Playstation is broken, less fun.
...wait, scratch, that, even if your Playstation is broken, he's less fun.
Zuck is not a lesser evil. He's the same evil. And Jeffrey bezos this week is having a laugh because nobody's paying attention to him at the moment.
I'm going to assume not all new users were Instagram users.
Pretty sure all new users are required to have an Instagram? I know for sure the two are linked. No deleting Threads without deleting your Insta.
Health history and fitness status
Instagram doesn't already collect that?
I think not
That surprises me. I assumed they took everything they could.
Also Facebook
I feel like what you're talking about is complaining about someone taking a dump on another, much larger pile of crap.
If you were already on Instagram that ship has sailed.
At least, they entertained me during a week or so.
They got nothing new. Just a few shitposts from Instagram users saying “I’m on Threads.”
"Last week, the text-based social media platform reported a record 100 million sign-ups in just five days."
LOL The biggest bullshit of the year... Meta just created shadow accounts of all Instagram users, without their knowledge or consent...
100 million isn't that much when it comes to Meta. There's over 2 billion "active" Instagram users that all were prompted to download the app. That means only 0.005% of Instagram accounts fell for it.
I have no doubt that at least that many people tried it out. When I went to the Android App store, Meta was paying for a front and center promotion of Threads.
Your maths is a little off there: 100m is 5%
IT'S JUST A FEW DECIMAL PLACES GIVE ME A BREAK 😆
What’s a few decimal places among friends, right?
while you're correct based on instagram's numbers, the other commenter would be correct if it was a British billion which is a million millions. just a fun fact 🦄
That's true, although the long scale billion hasn't been a thing even in Britain for decades.
If it's fun facts you like, try this: English is the clear odd one out, most other languages use milliard for 10^9 and billion for 10^12.
milliard - love it ty for that. Reminds me of: French: L'ananas Italian: L'ananas Icelandic: Ananas Portuguese: O ananás Swedish: Ananas German: Die Ananas
Eh... Check your math...
Right? Seems like he is off by a couple digits, unless we are missing something
Well, technically... they said "users", not "people". Maybe there are 2E12-1E8 bots... 🙃
Is there a way to check if a user account exists for my instagram account without logging in?
people reported already having followers before ever using the platform, meaning all people automatically had an account created for them. that (and many other things) is also very legally problematic in the EU which is why the service isnt available here.
It’s not hard to understand what was happening.
The issue with the EU is you can’t mingle and mix user data from two separate services.
"An account was already created for them" because it's the same Meta account. You can just follow people when you start your account without them necessarily activating threads.
Sole benefit of Brexit identified. We get to hand over our data to meta before you guys. It’s all been worth it.
I saw this in browser: You can go the person Instagram account and see if they have a thread logo next to it.
Exactly. Everybody checked what is this about, then stopped gave shit and here we are
Not to mention all the spam bots they fail to actually ban after multiple people report.
Bots generate user engagement! Granted, it's bad engagement, but it also generates jobs for the moderator
AIteamsWasn't it announced to be the case? So it's "just" without consent, which is already bad enough.
It's Google Plus all over again.
If people wanted the bird app, they would have already got the bird app, if they don't like the bird app, they would have got a Mastodon account.
It feels like the same reason that Reels isn't doing well, people who wanted TikTok would have already got TikTok, you can't force Instagram users to like Twitter/TikTok but on their Insta account instead.
I should have been more specific, what I meant was "people who want to use a microblogging platform but don't like who's running the bird app. "
But I would say reddit is mainstream enough that random 40 year olds probably has heard of it now, after all the large big profile celebrity AMAs, it's the 10th most visited site in the world and 6th in the US.
Mastodon is almost all 40yo white guys. Source: am one
And Misskey is mostly Japanese artists who need more privacy. Hence, Misskey is a Japanese product, and Japanese Twitter refugees might find Misskey useful. People should join any other Misskey instance instead, if Misskey.io is full.
Weirdly placed comment, but I do think these platforms need the advertising, so do continue to spread the word
Just to point out many ex-Digg users are 30-40 years old. I would agree a 40yo normie who only use Facebook wouldn't know about Reddit.
I'd say a lot of these 40 yo on Facebook actually got on reddit during the QAnon nonsense.
Wasn't r/the_Donald before Qanon?
There was ridiculous Q shit on reddit before Qanon became popular. In fact, that’s the first place I ever heard of it. I came upon a sub called, I think, cbts_radio (for “calm before the storm”) and was just like, what the fuck is this? It was a sub for off-topic casual discussion split off from the original cbts sub, and it was filled with the most ridiculous anti-Democrat/Hillary Clinton screechy conservative bullshit I’d ever seen. Qanon didn’t enter the public awareness for another couple of years after that.
Seems qanon is from 2017 and the_donald from 2015.
I'm not American so not sure about qanon.
Google+ had more than one thing wrong with it. Just for example ...
The precursor to Google+ was called Google Buzz, and it was rolled out to Gmail users in a way that exposed privacy & security problems with Gmail contacts. This led to a lawsuit and a settlement which Google had to obey when releasing their next "social media" attempt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz#Privacy
As a result, Google+ became a heavy-handed effort that tried to hew closely to the settlement's privacy & consent requirements while assimilating seemingly-unrelated projects such as YouTube comments.
IMHO Google+ had one good thing: Circles. You could define groups of people to share stuff with, without those people having to "join a group".
I don't think people understood it well, though.
Mastodon sort of has this.
I'm never going to download or sign up for TikTok. I know Meta isn't really that great as far as privacy goes, but at least they don't share information directly with the CCP. Fuck the CCP. IG Reels works just fine for me. I actually can't stand the IG home feed because of the algorithm showing me what it wants to show me instead of a chronological timeline of the posts of the people I follow, so I mostly just use IG for stories and Reels.
All social media based in the U.S. share information to the three letter agency, confirmed by the NSA leaks.
I trust America more than China. If some foreign government has to have my data, I'd rather it be America.
Why? Isnt a government that directly affects you a more immediate problem? Sure we're not authoritarian, but the things the FBI, ATF, CIA, NSA, ETC have done sure look like it.
Yeah I hate that curated list bullshit. It made both FB and YouTube worse, too. And both were intended to manipulate users into spending more time there. Ironically, I haven't been on as many YouTube dives into the random following interesting videos from the recommended ones since they started curating their list based on what you've previously watched (and seemingly picking one or two of them to tunnel vision on).
YouTube used to work by showing you videos that other people who watched that video watched, which was really great for music discovery. Now it shows me things that I already watched with a small sprinkling of new things. The front page still suggests things I haven’t seen before related to things I watched. I think they were pressured to make that change because it was taking impressionable people too quickly down rabbit holes of extremism… seems like it still does though.
I miss the old YouTube dives. You never knew where you would end up.
Unless you live in China, are a Chinese national, or have someone living in China who could be used to blackmail you, then you shouldn't care much about what data the CCP has on you.
Meta shares data with the NSA and likely any other US allies, so that might be a slight concern if you live in any country like that.
Lemmy makes all its data essentially free for everyone to grab, so... Hi CCP, Hi NSA, Hi CIA, Hi MI6, Hi FSB...
lol dumbest post i read on this site this week. log off and seek therapy
I mean, to be honest, I feel like it's the quality of the content in there. I used my old phone (the one I use for apps like threads) to get a threads account and people are using Threads as if they're using instagram.
For example, you see a pocture of someone or a drawing, you get into the post to see the 45 comments people left and all of them are:
Comment #1: "Magnificent 🥰😍" #2: "Amazing 🤩" #3: "WOW!! 🔥🔥"
And so on.
At least in twitter there is more "discussion" (albeit toxic and usually useless) or at least more people sometimes talking about interesting things.
I guess it turns out that when you pretty much automatically port over so the Instagram users they treat it like Instagram.
toxic and useless dont really summarize it imo- last few times I went there the top 10-15 comments were just screaming right wingers yelling about a conspiracy of some sort no matter what the topic is
Looking in the replies of any new scientific discovery is infuriating, they're all spouting inane shit about how "science changed its story, so it has no credibility, this is proof that the earth is flat and 6000 years old."
the only reason it has any users is that it gave some fakeout on insta UI that your friends were talking about you on threads and, as per Meta usual, it was all bullshit. typical zuccing egotism for his upcoming cagematch.
strange. my "engagement" on lemmy is... "all day". strange indeed.
Maybe because we "care for each others" opinions. The weird thing about converting instagram users automatically to thread users is, that instagram is mostly a one-to-many communication. One Insta Model posting her newest picture and then thousand others comment and like it. Thread (and Lemmy) are more back and forth and commenting on comments. That means we have an active dialogue where things are discussed in a more natural way. The Insta model does not give a shit about a bi-directional communication with their followers. They prefer a mostly one way communication of send and receive (like or die). They don't really care for their followers opinions and certainly are not interested in a deeper dialogue with them. They want to expand their reach and likes first of all. Threads is very different in the interaction than instagram.
This is the problem I've always had with instragram. For a while I was storing certain pictures on there only because it seemed like a good place to store them that I could share with people if the time ever came for that (it didn't). The engagement side of things looked very slim.
absolutely. I am in search of peers, not influncers.
I would suspect that most of us on discussion board style platforms (and lemmy in particular) want peer engagement - something that is building quite nicely on lemmy.
This is a good point. It makes me wonder if maybe "engagement" isn't going to be a metric for whether Threads succeeds or fails. (Other things I have read suggests that it's hot garbage in ways other than lack of dialogue, so I still think people are dropping it, but they might be able to fix those things).
I tried it, because I still have a Facebook account I barely used.
I got like two screens of people I subscribed to and after they are out of new posts the platform tries to push a bunch of popular influencers and brands that I couldn't care less about. They couldn't get me to close it faster if they tried.
W
Just: Honestly, we figure Twitter will keep staggering along until its servers implode.
Relevent: https://youtu.be/VbX1r-Vre9o
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/VbX1r-Vre9o
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I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good bot
Are the Threads user numbers being quoted still inflated because everyone with an Instagram account received a shadow Threads account?
"Oh you're a villain alright, just not a SUPER one!"
I'm pretty sure the platform that kills Twitter will be Twitter. It's not going to be a question of a superior platform luring people away, Twitter is just going to become unusable because of the management. When that happens, replacements will compete with one another. I don't personally have an opinion on which is going to win the competition, but I think you make good points about important users vs features.
well everyone downloaded it to get their usernames
I haven't, but thats actually surprising. Back in 2001 someone had my name for their Yahoo email (it's an unusual but common one) and decided then that I wouldn't let it happen again.
For the next few years, I would immediately register for everything that looked like I would use it.
Got a good Hotmail in the 90s. But later on I would register for every little thing like Hushmail. Shushmail. Then MySpace. The best, though, was when I managed to get an invite in late 2007 for a little email service provider that was called Gmail.
Suck it every other variation of [email protected]!
(Not my actual email.)
I got firstlastname on Gmail and I find it a curse now. There are old people all over the place with the same name that simply can't remember their email address and end up using mine. I have had everything from non profit fun runs in North Carolina to aerial crop photos from Idaho that apparently farmers pay for? It was like a $100 a month service... . Luckily I use first.lastname so I can filter out their emails quickly since they never have the . Occasionally when it's an email from a small company or something like that i send responses but most of it I just junk now.
i have what i imagine is a fairly unusual variation: my firstname.lastname is pretty common in the english speaking world, but my last name is apparently derived from a place if you go back far enough, so i use firstname.of.lastname. subtle but different.
This is me too, including every janky MMO I think I might remotely like. Gotta grab my character name. But Threads, haven't bothered to touch it.
I see exactly where you're coming from but personally when making usernames I can never re-use one because I always feel like the next one I make is going to be "the one" and trump all of my pathetic previous attempts lol.
That urge to be better, to continue growing has entire life. Never satisfied. New vehicle? First thought is "how can I tweak it to make it better?" Then I begin tweaking with things and am happy. The second that I can't find more things to tweak and feel that it's as close to perfect as can be within my capabilities it becomes stale and I lose interest.
This is a cancer for my passion in writing lyrics as in my opinion art can NEVER be good enough. The more time you put into it, the better it gets and if a change I've made makes something worse I start from square one and begin again. I've been writing music for nearly my entire life but only ever actually recorded music in the beginning when it was just a hobby. Then I realized that it was something I could actually be good at and became serious. Haven't recorded a single track since. I just write and write and write. Even when I make something beautiful, to me, that I made that? Just means I'm capable of making something better on the next page so the beauty is forgotten as soon as it was realized.
Sorry for the rant and personal details! Sometimes I use my comments as a means of introspection. Would just paste them into my notes app but I don't. I leave them in the hopes that maybe someday someone can maybe help me figure myself out or at the very least not feel so alone if they are similar.
Have a nice day/night.
That is a beautiful sentiment about usernames, BallsInTheShredder
... another terrific username, notelonmusk, although I am slightly concerned that you might be lying.
See someone called me KlossN in high school because it was similar to my last name, and now noone calls me that but it's been my username everywhere since. Not making a fucking threads account tho, if y'all want my name you can have it
That's why I believe that the username crisis is real. Future generations won't have short usernames and will have to use increasingly longer usernames to have a unique one, or have a Redditesque default [word1][word2][4numbers].
We might as well just go all out and just have everyone use a UUID with minimal chances of username collision.
If you really need to have the same name in many services, it’s going to be really hard or even impossible. Having a nice and short name in one service is possible, because the name of the service adds some extra length to the whole thing. Just think of Lemmy names for example [shortName]@[InstanceName].[something]. The whole thing is actually pretty long, so making that unique is very easy.
Old comment by this time, but their usernames are tied to their Instagram account, correct? So there wasn't much, "securing their name" From that angle.
I couldn't personally say as it's not available in Europe.
I'm one of the many who deactivated not too long after it launched. My dashboard was just being filled with so many users (mostly celebrities and influencers) who I don't recall ever following or even being on my sphere of interest. It doesn't help that their posts are inorganic attempts to spur engagement.
No hashtags, no anonymity…. Threads has no purpose and is likely to fail unless this changes
I doubt that Instagram users who willingly install an another app made by Facebook care about that lol
They want anonymity from relatives/friends. Most people don't care much about advertisers knowing their interests.
This is the issue with the new "own nothing, subscription only" and "if you're not the customer, you're the product" type models. Everyone went to Threads to take a look at the brand new thing, but now everyone has seen the new thing they're gone.
All the hype that was built up initially based on that curiosity comes across as arrogance and empty promises as users inevitably get bored of the new shiny thing that's really just another attempt to harvest them for their metadata and ad-sense.
And they can't delete their account without deleting their Instagram while also sending their phone's data, including health data, to Meta.
I wonder why.
I've had this conversation many times, and they always say something like "I have nothing to hide, so I don't care", to which I respond with "I have to hide, either, but nothing I want to share. Since you have nothing to hide and you don't care, what's your bank account number, tax ID number, credentials, etc. etc. I won't use it for anything bad, promise."
They still don't get it....
I’ve had some success by asking them to unlock their phone and give it to me so I can read their messages and look at their photos. As they refuse, I tell them “but you just said you’ve got nothing to hide and you don’t care?”
I did that once to a friend of mine, but because he knows me and known I'm trustworthy, he did it hahaha I had to resort to verbalizing the invasive actions I would take when I got the phone so that my point would sink in
And you could add that you probably wouldn't learn as much about them by looking at their phone for a few minutes than Threads transmits to Meta every second of every day.
Especially since there's over 2 BILLION Instagram users. Why would anyone who uses Instagram have any concerns with Threads?
We've been training AI models since picture based captchas.
Hell, we were training Google's voice recognition back in '07 with GOOG-411
Side question: what client is that? It looks amazing
I think it's "Connect for Lemmy"
It's pretty hard to start working in the EU if you look at the absolute pile of data that Threads demanded. The GDPR paperwork to make sure they can get away with that AND still comply to GDPR would be more than the whole internet.
What I'm hearing from your statement, is that we need a GDPR-like ruleset in every country.
Yes, we absolutely do.
Is it because it's filled to the brim with old memes? That would make me want to leave a new place. Tried kbin social the other day and the first three pages were all full of the old memes being posted here and i spent half an hour or so trying to figure out how to filter them out but couldn't so I just uninstalled.
Lol I feel like ![email protected] polluted a lot of the internet lately.
Look i'm not that much of a curmudgeon that i begrudge people enjoying themselves and getting along, I just need to be able to easily filter content i have no interest in, memes/macros being one of those. I'm still accessing lemmy through mobile browser and can skim past all that quite easily on here, but kbin blew every image up automatically and it was 90% of the content and i couldn't figure out how to turn it off.
You should just need to block the community. There's a 🚫 symbol on the sidebar of a community, just click that and the posts should stop showing up on any of your feeds.
If you're on mobile, the formating is kinda fucked so you'll have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find it.
The problem is that multiple unrelated communities also saw a surge of old memes when the original community blew up
sure, yeah.. I thought it was harmless fun, myself
For a while, it felt like Lemmy Shitpost needed to outcompete it.
Oh i see it now! Thanks!
Yeah there was some boring fucking trend going around where people posted 10 year old memes. I had to block four or five communities to have a usable lemmy experience.
In some ways this whole thing feels like WoW classic. A lot of people trying to relive the internet of their youth, while not realizing things weren't actually that great back then either. I can haz cheesburger? What the fuck were we thinking.
To me that all felt very much like a Reddit thing. Somebody made a joke about that about posting old memes that was MAYBE mildly amusing, then everybody went ahead and killed the horse before beating it for 24 hours.
Agreed. These "trends" that last for a couple of days before switching to the next one are stupid. People just start spamming old shitty content only because everyone else is too. It definitely makes Lemmy more active but getting my feed filled with low effort shitposts is not the kind of activity I'm looking for. I've been here for a month and I've already blocked more users/communities than I ever did on reddit.
I've heard of one instance called beehaw that's seems to be more curated so to say. It may interest you.
Thanks but I'll rather curate my feed myself. Beehaw is a bit too woke for my liking.
We were younger. There's no shame in being young, and liking things then that seem stupid now.
Reminds me of the old saying: "how do you make a million dollars in the stock market? Start with a billion"
Start with a billion visitors, then snag 100 million, then keep 1 million then blaghole the site
They launched it without addressing the obvious issues like spam and low-quality content. The easy migration from Instagram basically turned threads into... Instragram. Literally the same low quality posts and low quality engagement of Instagram transfered over. Seriously, have you ever read comments on Instagram? It's the bottom of the barrel in the every sense of the expression. That's Threads now.
Also, poetically threads on Threads are even harder to follow and navigate than Twitter.
Isnt instagram primarily used for.... pictures and images? I seen comments the times i have used it - the comments are generally very low quality and low brow.
I played around with it and it’s basically useless without a follower only feed. And the posts tend to just basically disappear forever after a feed refresh.
But if they follow through on ActivityPub integration I’ll be stoked to follow all the normies that couldn’t get by on mastodon that are using threads. More content = more better.
I won't be happy if they integrate federation. Ever heard the phrase "embrace, extend, extinguish"? It's a tactic used by large companies to squash growing competition.
Google used it, for example, to squash a growing open-source chat messenger protocol called XMPP. (Think of XMPP like ActivityPub.) Google allowed its Google Talk application to integrate with people using XMPP. (They embraced XMPP.)
Then, they added their own proprietary features that wouldn't work with normal XMPP users. (They extended, or built on top of, XMPP.)
Then, they cut support for XMPP integration, leaving it effectively dead in the water. XMPP users suddenly had a list of Google Talk users in their friend list who would never appear online again, whereas Google Talk users maybe had one or two people in their friend list who looked like they'd moved on from Google Talk. (They extinguished XMPP.)
Now imagine that happening with Threads. You, a Mastodon user, follow a bunch of people who just happen to be on Threads. There are some things Threads users can do that you can't, but you don't really mind. It works well enough. Then, one day, Threads stops working with Mastodon. Suddenly, over half of the people you followed are no longer available to you. The only way you can follow them again... is to join Threads.
The danger here is that Threads will suddenly be > 99% of the activity and user base in one fell swoop. You might find that Mastodon doesn't scale as well as you think. It might also be that Threads deliberately or half assedly doesn't federate properly, so that being a non-Threads user means posts aren't visible inside of Threads or suffer from down ranking or other issues.
I'd add that historically federation hasn't gone well when a big fish enters a small pond. XMPP was cited above as an example of that. At the time you had proprietary services like AOL / AIM, ICQ, Instant Messenger. XMPP was going to liberate us from proprietary and even Google got on board for a bit before dumping it.
The problem with big companies is they want all the cake to themselves and abhor having to yield control or cooperate with others. Meta might make nice noises about ActivityPub while they're the underdog to Twitter but you could see them rapidly change their tune if Twitter went under.
I'm surprised I don't hear as much of "I wan't literally nothing to do with Meta in any way shape or form" sentiment (which happens to be my feelings on the matter).
Federation is the most interesting thing thats happened on the internet since http became the standard in my opinion, and I've been kicking around since Telnet, BBCs, IRC, Etc.
Meta doesn't want to play nice, they want to see if they can own everything, in my opinion. "Oh, people are doing this cool thing that we can't yet monitize and make our shareholders richer? See if we can somehow assimilate it, at a loss at first, as ususal of course."
I'm not sure about embrace, extend, extinguish, but it does sound like it'd be the way here. Either way, why the living fuck can we not have anything interconnected that a megacorp can't decide they'll take over? Why can't we keep that from happening, even when small independent individuals are running the server?
The entire point of ActivityPub is that it's open and EEE-proof. If the users leave it for something proprietary but better, then it isn't EEE, it's just a better product.
Simply being open source is not an achievement in itself. The platform has to be user friendly, stable and future-proof. Most FOSS and federated alternatives create a platform and then endlessly harp on federation like that's the end. No, that's the beginning. The point is to make a product better than Big Tech WHILE maintaining federation and Foss status. THAT is what makes a platform EEE proof.
That's literally the second E, extend.
Nothing is EEE-proof. If Meta puts even just 10 billion dollars into developing and marketing their fediverse EEE project, it's going to be better for the average user (I.e: billions of people already using Meta's services) than what a couple of FOSS devs made for free in their spare time.
That's not what extend means in this context. In this context, extend means to add non-standard features to the protocol which only your implementation understands.
If they embrace ActivityPub and then start adding their own proprietary features that are enough for users to switch over, and Mastodon doesn't, then it's not an "evil agenda", it's Meta adding an essential feature that the users want and Mastodon isn't able to add and ultimately Meta making a better product.
If Mastodon or Lemmy are truly superior and the future, then the product should be the best in the market, not DUE to federation but DESPITE it.
That's one thing that everyone here forgets because right now federation is hard to get into, and the only people here are those who put the effort in because they believe in federation. That is the reason for their tolerance in an inferior product. But if that's the case, then it will never be mainstream as long as the product is inferior.
ActivityPub is open source. This means, by definition, Meta are allowed to use it. They could easily do the extinguish part by just never using the protocol. If another platform existing is such a threat to the Fediverse then we're doomed to failure in the first place.
While Google removing XMPP no doubt helped sink nails into the coffin, WhatsApp played a bigger role in the death of XMPP than Google removing it from Talk. It was increasingly irrelevant for a now growing number of people.
The point of "embrace, extend, extinguish" is primarily to get rid of any potential future competition. So, for example, it would not work if Facebook tried to do it with Twitter since the latter already reached critical mass and can stand on its own without outside help, barring bad leadership. It typically only works if the party that's being "embraced" is smaller than the company that's "embracing".
To your point of ActivityPub being open source: that's true, so Meta is, legally speaking, free to use it. However, barring any restrictions in the license, they're also free to add any proprietary features to Threads that don't work on Mastodon. It's similar to Google Chrome: Google has their open-source Chromium web browser, but they also have a version called Chrome that has features that are not open-source.
The thing with Wine is that, from what I understand, it was made to help Windows software run on Linux. From the beginning, its primary intention was to help Linux users. Facebook's primary intention is to get more money. If they believe extinguishing Mastodon will further that goal, they'll do it. Unfortunately, I don't believe Mastodon is big enough to make Thread users think they'll be missing any significant amount of content if Facebook removed ActivityPub support.
Makes sense. People are thirsty for a something along the lines of "Twitter, but fewer nazis", so tons of people checked it out, but it still lacks feature parity with Twitter since it was a rushed-to-market MVP.
I think once it adds on a handful of new features, it's only a matter of time before audiences gravitate to Threads over a platform whose owner is bragging about funnelling money to human traffickers.
The honeymoon phase is reaching its end
Same with Lemmy. Active users seems to be stalling
Not a bad thing if true. I'd prefer a slow and steady growth. Let the more dedicated people among us build a stable foundation, then people will switch organically. I almost feel bad for being here in some sense because I have a very general understanding of how Lemmy even works.
I know that it's open-source and decentralized, but I struggled/struggle to understand what instances are, what communities are which, what server I joined, how communities are moderated and where to find rules...etc. I really want to gain traction in regional team subs with game day threads for Lemmy, but I have no idea how to code a bot to post them automatically with auto updating game info and stats.
If it makes you feel better, I probably understand Lemmy less well than you, so if you're a misfit, so am I, lol. I see my role here as "someone to put words in the databases other people build."
Because Lemmy top topic before are only talking about Reddit, and people love talk about it since api contro. Now since Reddit hype are down, people start to think how to make Lemmy topic different and somewhat great than on Reddit I think.. So, it takes time to see the average Lemmy users activity..
If they all came from Instagram, or is used to how Instagram is, I'm not suprised this happens. People use Insta for likes only, not comments/discussions. Sadly.
Nope. I'm here
Doesn't seem surprising. It's the new shiny thing and then interest wanes a bit. Probably same holds true of Lemmy IMO. That said Threads is now a viable replacement for Twitter and advertisers might decide one platform is a toxic cesspit and the other isn't (and has some big crossover influencers) and spend accordingly. Even if it only hurts Twitter by a few % of revenue, that still more losses for Musk's ego purchase and it should be seen as a good thing.
Threads is allegedly going to support ActivityPub so theoretically itself and Mastodon, and Lemmy could all have some kind of federated access to each other. But Threads is an enormous whale in a pond of minows so how that would work is anyone's guess.
Social networks that end up being successful have a long initial growth phase. Interest waning after a couple of days is a terrible sign. Threads is already dead.
Way too early to proclaim that. You might as well proclaim Lemmy the same - after all, the controversy over Reddit will fade in time and so too will interest in moving away from it.
you forgot the other variable of spez/elon causing another controversy that reignites the interest tho
Lemmy is a completely different thing. It is a grassroots movement of geeks motivated by an ideal. It has some chance of having enough people "fueling the fire" while it grows slowly and, also importantly, it does not need to grow like crazy to survive. This contrasts with threads, which is an attempt by a big tech company to capture mainstream audience. The mainstream has the attention span of 5 seconds, forms an opinion and never goes back. Either it is immediately fun or it is a flop. Threads had the best possible shot, riding on the enormous unpopularity of Musk and being able to piggy back on the huge user base of Instagram. They took the shot, it didn't work. The only way they can get a second shot is if another extraordinary event happens. I will admit that given the current tech leadership (and specifically Musk) this is not impossible, but otherwise I'm pretty confident in declaring Threads' stillbirth.
Yeah, the novelty of it will fizzle out. Some will call it their new home. Others will go back to Twitter or other. Some will check back in periodically.
Unoriginal Social Media Gimmicks - The next big thing, or just another flash in the pan?
At least not until there's a damn web version.
Lol, this funny trend of having a stupid ass homepage that just links to an app store.
It's for the data harvesting they get from your phone.
And despite that I can't believe some people are still not highly skeptical of federating with meta as though there isn't over a decade of privacy infringing business practices. Instead wanting to hear them out after they just went through deleting content from reddit because they didn't want to provide value to Spez, but they are fine with providing content for meta users to interact with for Zuckerberg?
Twitter had the most data harvesting with news sites embedding tweets. Can't do that with an app and no web.
That is likely a benefit but let’s be honest the real reason is that a web version would require a lot of additional overhead especially to staff enough engineers.
A web wrapper for the platform would be effectively no effort, especially for a company like Facebook. The difficulties would be losing out on tracking data and dealing with annoyances like adblock
I wouldn’t be surprised if they are working on something now and just wanted to get the app out as an mvp.
This makes no sense honestly. Making a captive web app is easier than supporting two apps.
Easier doesn’t mean better though.
Probably because it's a complete mess. I joined as I was curious and don't really care if I have to delete my Instagram account to get rid of my Threads account. You follow people and then barely see their updates.
From what I've heard about the feel it's a giant data (=cash) grab. Sorta like how Google+ was a me-too and never took off.
The massive inrush is like what happens when the new restaurant opens in town. Everyone goes once or twice to check it out but if it sucks it will still fail even if it is super busy the first week.
Well, yeah. It was the cool new thing, now it isn't.
Was it even ever cool?
Or new.. Same shit in a different package.
Mobile only is a no-go for me. Sorry Zuck.
A mobile only platform is pretty much destined to be the lowest quality social media site around.
Just having a keyboard and mouse makes thoughtful expression so much easier.
YouTube comments would like a chance at bat.
I think it is a three-dimensional bell curve. At one end are the Thumb Warriors on their Phone pumping out vitriol and stupid ideas. At another end are Keyboard Warriors in their basement pumping out vitriol and stupid ideas. And at the third point are the Corporate “Social Media Consultants” pumping out Advertising and Manipulative media.
It would be for me, too, if Zuckerberg weren't a no-go all by himself.
This is expected? New service, people flock, it's not for everyone that flocked, buzz dies down
I'll stick with Mastodon in any case
Will it go the way of Clubhouse (remember that one?)? 🤔
I don't know about threads but bluesky will go that way
Yeah, I only heard about BS
😁a few days ago while learning about the Fediverse. Also Jack Dorsey gives bad vibes.Womp Womp
Good
It will prabably go back once Elon does his next thing and or the work out some QOL problems.
Give it a home feed that isn't solely algorithmically driven and it'll be back.
Shocking news
Maybe those 10 Million new subscribers were just bots.
There were definitely "phantom accounts" created out of people's instas who didn't actually sign up.
A flood of brands I can't opt out of--I gotta mute/block each of them individually--no bookmarks or drafts for Threads I might like to come back to, no fuckin' gifs, mobile only, de-prioritization of news...
Tbh it's just kinda lame.
I think a big part of the initial explosive growth was due to ease of access. Almost everybody has an instagram account, and that made it really easy for people to just “check out” threads. I’m not surprised that a lot of people didn’t end up sticking around.
Is there a rimjob_steve equivalent on Lemmy?
The fact that you find me worthy of that is truly an honor.
I think this is where the big numbers came from, yeah. That, and cleverly pushing up the launch date to practically the same day Elon limited access to Twitter, so everyone was looking for doomscroll methadone.
Not even just checking out, everyone with an Instagram account had a Threads account created or linked for them with no user input. This was done on purpose in order to boost their user count on launch. Probably 80% of people with a Threads account have never once opened the platform.
Just like twitter rose to prominence as being one stolen feature of facebook (that being the contemporary facebook’s “status”), Meta must pull a single feature from its long-dead predecessors. I demand platform where you list 6 of the people you know from Most favorite to Least, the top three being Tom, Air-humping Storm Trooper and Tila Tequila. That is the only thing that can undo the unknown energies of the Blue Bird,
I found it terribly boring. It felt like twitter but with much less functionality.
Seeing how useless Rotton Tomatoes is as a barometer of quality, I’m not sure that the best metaphor.
Someone accidentally shutdown the bot farm
The impression I got from Threads is it was all the ads and brands of twitter without the actual people.
And half of movement there is just bots reposting shit from twitter. Indeed great success.
I’m sure there’s at least a few ChatGPT bots too!
Not surprising. People use what they know, and people use what other people use. I'm sticking around on Lemmy, though.
Expected. They haven't added lots of essential features yet so it doesn't even have anywhere near feature parity with Twitter, making it more pleasant and useful for people to Twitter.
It was alright I guess the first week, but really the big part that interested me was the Fediverse, and I really do hope people jump off Threads to come use other platforms.
Some might not and I wish Meta goes by there work and does Fediverise to allow those users to use the wider Fediverse
Do they count account creation as engagement? I suppose it was only engagement for people there
Everyone's lurking now.
Looks like they’re tracking time on site
not too surprised. this happens with platforms like there where there's a surge of initial interest and then it dies down to the people that will actually use it. it'll either stagnate and die like most google social products, or it'll start to grow and users will generate content that others want to see.
Of course everything will “calm down” in due time, some after then others.
Once the FOMO of this wears off I still think Twitter will reign supreme (not that I care for either just saying)
Both can co exists it’s not always about who has the most users or engagement crap that gets thrown around now a days.
It'll probably even out. More people will use multiple platforms, follow people where they are active etc.
I’m doubtful. Advertisers will prefer Threads. A massive install base in an app run by a company that has a proven track record of moderation that protects brands. Meta isn’t perfect but brands trust them.
Initially, I expect you're right, but advertisers also monitor whether users see ads, click on them, and make purchases once they click. Advertisers might not drop it as fast as users, but they will eventually go where the users go.
That is true they are courting advertisements way more on Threads.
Another one bites the dust
I tried it at first too, and haven’t been on in a couple days. No Trending view and no hashtags makes it not very useful as a social network, and the novelty of text based Instagram posts wore off really quickly.
Threads just needs to add more features. It's pretty bare bones right now and has a lot of room for improvements especially comparing it to Twitter. Once they do that I think it will be easier for them to retain users.
Now that people are getting paid monetizing their Blue checked Twitter account Threads is going to become a other Google+ with old people.
Back to Twitter.....