Threads now has 275m users 😳 So I guess it’s officially the new Twitter. I doubt Xitter no longer has the 330 million it had before Musk bought it.
@pratik I bailed on it last month, deleting Instagram at the same time. Its moderation and algorithm meant annoyance overshadowed whatever joy it brought. Its lack of real tagging took away any discoverability that centralization offers. I also got tired of waiting for Meta to follow through on real federation.
@pratik The absence of hashtags on Micro.blog, or a better selection and implementation of what it does offer, is also a downer, but that’s not why I joined.
@KyleEssary a mystery for sure - I follow 5,000 microblog accounts and the timeline is rarely overwhelming
Weren't all of the Instagram accounts automatically on Threads? I wonder how many are actually active users.
If so, it might not be an indication of organic growth; more like those users discovering it exists.
Regardless, the integration with the Fediverse is suspiciously incomplete. Seems like an Embrace, Extend, Extinguish move to me.
I heard some of the actual developers who work on Threads on a podcast recently. They certainly seemed earnest and optimistic about participating in making the world a better place.
They're not the ones I worry about though...
None of these companies are federating because it is a good thing for everyone else; they just want a poison-tipped finger in the pie.
Our best hope is that standards like ActivityPub will become so pervasive that they'll be dragged kicking and screaming into interoperability.
@pratik same here: I Wade into the Facebook morass occasionally because I have to.
Can't really avoid it, but coming back to Mastodon is a breath of fresh air. I wonder if that's just because it's new, or by design, or someone hasn't found a way to enshittify it yet.
The design is obviously a big factor, but bad actors will push the boundaries.