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.

@markstoneman Fair about hashtags. Wish platforms just admitted that hashtags are here to stay, and learn how to moderate them instead of fighting them. Re: real federation, I think they are getting there. The scale of Meta/Threads is making it difficult so they are taking it slow which I think is fine.

@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.

@markstoneman Yeah, Micro.blog has no excuse. The emoji-tags is clearly limiting.

@pratik I wonder what the ratio of active/inactive users is for both sites.

@KyleEssary a mystery for sure - I follow 5,000 microblog accounts and the timeline is rarely overwhelming

@KyleEssary Twitter and Threads or Micro.blog? Micro.blog had 4399 active <del>users</del> accounts last month.

@pratik I actually meant Twitter and Threads. I don't think of Micro.blog in the same category.

@KyleEssary We may get some semblance of accurate numbers from Threads (disclosures during public earnings call) but with Twitter, I wouldn't trust anything that Musk says.

@pratik True.

@pratik

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.

@pratik where did you get that number?

@ianjs Yup. But you have to activate your Threads account separately. Not all my Instagram friends are yet on Threads but occasionally I see a few join. Then the ones who are active in a day or month count towards that metric.

Re:fediverse, so far I think they’re sticking by their promise. Its scale makes it difficult to simply roll everything out at once. See Ghost’s attempts and how careful they’ve to be even though their user base is minuscule.

@pratik

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.

@ianjs I agree that we shouldn't blindly trust them. We cannot force everyone else to have the same values as we do, but if I can have a Mastodon account to follow my friends on Threads and interact with them, I can live with that. Coz right now, I'm completely cut off from my family and friends who are on Facebook coz I quit it years ago.

@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.

@pratik your laptop must be reaaaaallly far a way. 😉