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Threads, an Instagram app
- yarsanich 3y ago[dead]
- kavinkumar 3y agoI have used the threads from meta interface is slicky and smoothy in the first version but it felt down in some features like hashtags,usage limits,editable posts,direct messages,desktop options,NSFW content etc..,.I think they will fix this in future
- lefrenchy 3y agoSo it begins...
- ethanbond 3y agoSeems closer to the ending at this point (for Twitter).
- elforce002 3y agoSo, the ending of twitter is to switch to Threads with FB's content moderation guidelines? I don't think so. We have social media fatigue rn. Twitter is is ok to get info really fast, rarely goes down, you have access to all kind of views (from extreme left to extreme right). This is the main reason gab, truth social, etc... won't be mainstream. Fb hasn't been original from a long time. From trying to launch a substack competitor, stealing snapchat features, creating reels, etc. Now, developer wise, is a different game. React, Pytorch, Prophet, etc... hit after hit. Twitter can be a "cesspool" but I don't trust fb at all.
- clipsy 3y ago> Twitter is is ok to get info really fast, rarely goes down, you have access to all kind of views (from extreme left to extreme right). Twitter was ok to get (and, equally important in my opinion, share) info really fast; now you need to have an account, be logged in, and be under your meager daily quota to even be allowed to see anything. And everyone you want to share info with needs to do the same. The recent changes have pretty severely undermined what made Twitter stand out among its larger competitors.
- elforce002 3y agoThe quota is temporary. I agree with you that latest changes have been crazy,but it 's not the end of the world. I much rather prefer Twitter than give Zuckerberg more power. Now, I see them winning if they go Twitter's route and nuke their content moderation guidelines but since that won't happen, I doubt you'll see mass migration from the freedom fighters, hehe. Reality is they need each other. Conflict is what gets Twitter going. That and memes.
- rsynnott 3y ago> rarely goes down This would be the site that has been effectively largely down for the last three days?
- elforce002 3y agoWell, I said rarely, not never, hehe.
- astrange 3y agoThe only "extreme left" account I followed on Twitter (Chad Loder) was personally banned by Elon because his #1 priority post-Grimes breakup has been trying to become a made man so the internet fascists will let him into their gang. There are certainly tankies on there, which is a kind of person that claims to be left but is actually a reactionary.
- ethanbond 3y agoI think the vast majority of people don’t care much about what happens at the outer bounds of content moderation. Most people go to Twitter for pretty normal internet conversations, which are increasingly difficult to have there: the Blue buffoons being at the top of every thread with nothing worthwhile to say, the constant spotlight on Elon drama, rate limiting, huge jump in bugginess, etc. FB allows a sufficiently diverse, extreme, and even toxic political environment on FB for most everyone. What kind of content would Threads forbid that is more crucial to Twitter users than a functional service? Putting the content of people who have to pay for engagement above everyone else was one of the most heroically dumb product decisions I’ve ever heard. I was fine putting up with everything else but then the service just became legitimately not compelling because of that.
- vollkornbrot 3y agoMight elon be damagin twitter to help mark push this?
- duncan-donuts 3y agoWhy would he do that?
- duncan-donuts 3y agoBig signals that Musk made a lot of mistakes with twitter if Meta scrambled to ship a competitor like this. I don’t use Twitter so I won’t use this either but it’ll be interesting to see if the instagram folks can take this market from twitter.
- photonerd 3y agoThis has been known to be coming for quite a while, so it’s probably just opportune timing on their part being close enough to ready to ship. But hooooly crap does it underscore how much of a catastrophe Musk’s actions are.
- duncan-donuts 3y agoOh I didn’t know that. At any rate those product folks at instagram have likely been salivating for the last couple months. Probably would be an extremely fun team to be on right now.
- TchoBeer 3y agoImagine being on a relatively niche meta project making a twitter clone and then suddenly twitter starts imploding.
- BasedAnon 3y agoMusk's actions generally speaking make a lot of financial sense, it's just that he bought a company that wasn't founded on financial sense, and now all that debt requires payment because the economy is in tatters
- richbell 3y ago> Musk's actions generally speaking make a lot of financial sense, it's just that he bought a company that wasn't founded on financial sense... He bought it for ~40% more than it was valued and then scared away a lot of advertisers. That does not make financial sense, and is in large part the root of Twitter/his money problems.
- blinky88 3y agoGreat timing, given Twitter's situation
- dstaley 3y agoAs a Mastodon/Fediverse user, I hope the rumors that this is based on ActivityPub are true. I'd love for there to be an easy-to-use interface for everyone that brings more people and content into the Fediverse.
- est 3y ago> I hope the rumors that this is based on ActivityPub are true. Like how GTalk use XMPP, the port 5222 opens, but with tons of customizations and extensions that 3rd-party program can only use the basics?
- shinratdr 3y agoSeriously, no need for 3rd party app support, simple on-boarding of users and I can still follow everyone with Mastodon & Ivory? Sign me up. Or rather, sign up everyone I know besides me :)
- tomger 3y agoYou probably don’t want this as that would end in Embrace, extend, and extinguish.
- smoldesu 3y agoHow, exactly? What control does Meta exert over the Fediverse that the users cannot resist?
- jeroenhd 3y agoMeta has money to pay app developers to develop a good app. Most ActivityPub services have taken ages to get decent apps and even now Mastodon has some obvious problems. Opening someone else's profile if nobody on your server follows them shows you a barren timeline with no history and there's still no way to tell Mastodon "go fetch toots from this user's outbox".
- kelseyfrog 3y ago"ActivityPub with Meta extensions" If there are more Threads users than non-Threads users then non-Threads instance admins have to choose between adapt or risk emigration. EEE is a consolidation tactic after all.
- zui 3y agoAlso on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instagram.barcelona&gl=it https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instagram....
- silisili 3y agoHrm...mine tells me something went wrong when clicking. Is it a beta or something?
- zui 3y agoThat's strange, worked for me. Probably some A/B testing ...
- bdd 3y agoSeems like only available in certain locations. You can play with the `gl` query parameter in the URL. Yours is for Italy ("it"). It's available in other continental Europe locations like: de, fr, be, es, pt, at, cz, pl. While not yet released for majority English speaking countries (us, ca, uk, au, nz) with the exception of Ireland (ie). I don't have any insider information even though my employer is Meta. I learned about this release from HN.
- M2Ys4U 3y agoI'm guessing that the territories served by Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd have had the publication approved but the ones served by Meta Platforms, Inc haven't...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- TheAceOfHearts 3y agoNo web version? I guess it makes sense to launch iOS first since those are usually regarded as the highest status users / demographic.
- jeroenhd 3y agoThere's an Android version as well. https://www.threads.net/ https://www.threads.net/ shows a blank page titled "Instagram" but I'm guessing it'll soon show some kind of website once the server goes live.
- slimsag 3y agoIt shows a countdown timer with a QR code now.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoAka the most valuable to collect data from and advertise to.
- bin_bash 3y agoWSJ really did a great job with this headline: https://www.wsj.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-looks-to-deliver-hit-to-elon-musk-with-upcoming-twitter-clone-4a464407 https://www.wsj.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-looks-to-delive...
- acover 3y ago> Mark Zuckerberg Looks to Deliver Hit to Elon Musk With Upcoming Twitter Clone Named Threads Seems normal with a reference to the potential fight.
- xu_ituairo 3y agoWhat’s the joke?
- jadamson 3y agoProbably a reference to the cage fight that's totally going to happen: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/technology/elon-musk-mark-zuckerberg-cage-match.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/technology/elon-musk-mark...
- sneak 3y agoThat app privacy label is a doozy.
- JadoJodo 3y agoI saw that, as well. Makes the TikTok one look better.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoMark Zuckerberg would like to know your... everything.
- moralestapia 3y agoUsually these things take time to ship for a company the size of Meta right ... or ... not? Could it be that this was put in together in a couple sprints as they saw Twitter in a weak position? Or maybe they have a lot of products like this on the bench and release them when the time is right?
- photonerd 3y agoThis has been scuttlebutt (inc the name) for at least a few months. The big thing was the ActivityPub compatibility
- doctoboggan 3y agoIs the activitypub compatibility confirmed?
- lutoma 3y agoThere was a Mastodon thread by someone who had decompiled the leaked Android APK for Threads the other day. There were a few strings in there talking about the fediverse and federation with other servers, so it seems like they at least planned to add it at some point.
- photonerd 3y agoNot officially, but it’s about as unofficially confirmed as it’s possible to be. Though I have no idea if it’ll be available at launch.
- rsynnott 3y agoWell, it was announced that naughty old mr car would be buying twitter in about April last year. From then, there was enough chance it might all go horribly wrong that maybe they could justify this project.
- doctoboggan 3y agoI feel like the people who are concerned enough to leave twitter over the direction it's going will not jump straight into another app completely controlled by a single person. My guess is they will possibly see some growth from instagram power users who are convinced to try it, but I don't anticipate a mass diaspora from twitter to threads. EDIT: others in this thread are claiming that it may be compatible with activity pub. If that is the case then it may look a little more interesting to those leaving twitter.
- photonerd 3y agoThe average person doesn’t really care about that. They care if the site is functional & can other people see their posts. Right now neither of those are true of Twitter.
- ciabattabread 3y agoTwitter’s gonna be a ghost town soon the way it’s trending. Instagram is providing a lifeboat, and it’s a known quantity of “evil”. Compared to whatever the heck Musk is doing.
- anitil 3y agoWhat is the trend? Downwards in the sense of a few percent a year? Or a week?
- ciabattabread 3y agoA view quota is not a feature. Especially when the site was acceptably functional the day before.
- epc 3y agoCompletely anecdotal but: “views” as reported by Twitter of tweets on my private account are down roughly 80% YOY. My follower count has dropped slightly. I’ve been on Twitter since 2007. It’s been a roller coaster of fun, annoying, vaguely threatening and the company’s love/hate/begging/hate relationship with API developers has been maddening. It has the feel of every private equity takeover of a previously popular business, except that Musk and Co. failed to extract any value from the company before saddling it with untenable debt.
- jeroenhd 3y agoNo mention of federation or Mastodon in the description. I wonder how their negotiations with large Fediverse servers are going. Is there anything else that distinguishes this from existing Facebook products?
- akavi 3y agoThe number of people who have even heard of "federation" or "Mastodon" is a vanishingly small fraction of the target audience for this app. Why waste precious page space on it?
- ciabattabread 3y agoAnd if it is compatible with Mastodon, that audience will do all the advertising themselves.
- iopq 3y agoOur audience will advertise defederating from it
- jeroenhd 3y agoEven if barely anyone even considered using it, social media users will have heard the name "Mastodon" in the news. Even normal people news covered it during the start of Twitter's slow collapse. To be honest, I fail to see the value of Threads considering both Facebook and Instagram already exist. Is this just "Instagram but the image posts are optional"? Some kind of "explore not just Instagram but also the rest of the world" take could work to advertise their new network, maybe painting their shitty company in a better light.
- w-m 3y agoAny guesses on how much you'll be able to read, when following a link with a Desktop browser? Half a thread, or more? Before the inevitable full-page login overlay hits you straight in the face, as they always tend to do.
- mattl 3y agoThreads.net might just work in a browser. You may need to login to your Instagram account however.
- tedunangst 3y agoWhen, or if, they support activitypub you'll be able to read posts in the json viewer of your choice.
- wraptile 3y agoOr any custom front-end! Honestly if threads supports activitypub then Twitter is gone just like that - they show that they can afford to do everything Twitter does and without the lockdowns, whining and negging.
- data-ottawa 3y agoI don’t know much about how ActivityPub actually works, is it possible that Threads could provide too much content to the network and DoS smaller instances from building feeds?
- silisili 3y agoI'm not into FB/IG, but I'm curious why this was launched as 'an Instagram App', rather than 'by Facebook' or 'by Meta' or something similar?
- mrfox321 3y agoBecause "Instagram is cool" Joking aside, this is a branding decision.
- justahuman74 3y agoInstagram's brand name is much less tarnished than fb/meta.
- doctoboggan 3y agoI suspect it's because instagram is their brand with the most positive perceptions. FB is seen as old and meta is all about the metaverse.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cmeacham98 3y agoSimple: Facebook and Meta have garbage reputation compared to Instagram brand. The public associates Facebook/Meta with excessive data collection, overhyped VR, intrusive tracking, etc. That association is much weaker with Instagram.
- LeoNatan25 3y agoFunnily enough, I scrolled to the "Data Linked to You" section and was not disappointed.
- cmeacham98 3y agoTo be clear, I'm not saying that Instagram actually is any better than Meta/Facebook - but that their public perception isn't as disasterously tainted.
- meindnoch 3y agoSo after all, you can write twitter in a week, it seems.
- mellow-lake-day 3y agoThis has been in the works since January and still hasn't been released, so at least half a year
- meindnoch 3y agoI worked at Meta. Maybe I worked at the slowest department, but based on what I saw, if they really built this in half a year, then I'm absolutely positive that a nimble team of four can replicate it in a few weeks at most.
- lopkeny12ko 3y agoDisappointing that competitors are bootstrapping new social networks by mass-scraping Twitter data. This is almost certainly what Elon was referring to earlier this week; the same thing happened with Substack Notes. Hope Twitter pursues legal action against Meta for this.
- gsabo 3y agoI’m curious how you think data scraping could be used to bootstrap a new social network like this
- smoldesu 3y agoWhat content is being scraped, here?
- tills13 3y agomaybe I missed it but how does this utilize Twitter data for bootstrapping?
- brucethemoose2 3y agoI am not sure what you mean? Why does Threads need any Twitter data?
- threeseed 3y agoa) There is no evidence of mass-scraping. b) It is legal and ethical to scrape public data. Especially when that data is owned by its users and not by Twitter. c) The more likely explanation for Twitter's rate limiting is that they didn't pay their AWS/Google bill and rather than cut the service off they limited its bandwidth and/or compute capacity.
- asdadsdad 3y agoMeta is extremely hypocritical about scraping. They continuously send their legal team to threaten third parties on scraping of their platforms yet time and again are caught red-handed
- danShumway 3y ago> are bootstrapping new social networks by mass-scraping Twitter data I am 99% sure that this is not a real thing and that you're using all of these words incorrectly. When was Substack illegally scraping Twitter data? What Twitter data is being used to bootstrap Threads?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- znep 3y agoDoes anyone have any insight into if this a respin of the same Threads app from 2019 or just the same name? https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/10/03/threads-instagram-facebook-snapchat-app/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/10/03/threads-instagram-f...
- faefox 3y agoDifferent app altogether.
- eSandwich8 3y agoIt looks like only the name was reused. All the functionality in the previous Threads app is now in the main Instagram app.
- KSPAtlas 3y agoOn the fediverse, there's already a huge number of instances planning to block this app when possible as it isn't really in the spirit of the fediverse - it's proprietary, owned by a large company and centralized
- charcircuit 3y ago>it's proprietary but uses an open standard >owned by a large company This doesn't contradict with the fediverse. Getting large companies on board is important for ActivityPub's adoption. >and centralized So is almost every other fediverse instance.
- FridgeSeal 3y ago> by one of the most toxic and damaging tech companies I mean, this bits not great. Facebook didn’t write a fediverse compatible app because of warm fuzzy good feelings and wanting to contribute back to the community, they wrote one so they could capitalise and absorb the existing user base. They’ll do exactly the same thing they did with fb messenger at the beginning: massive interoperability with existing protocols and communities, followed by later deliberately breaking compat.
- iopq 3y agoit stopped bridging XMPP so it already did the EEE strategy once fool me once, shame on me fool me twice, you can't fool me again
- mullingitover 3y agoIt kinda doesn't matter? I would wager this will likely eclipse the fediverse's total userbase in a day or two. They simply post a banner for logged-in IG users, "Tap here to get the new twitter-murdering app, no signup needed", and they have an instant eight-figure userbase.
- delecti 3y agoYep. Assuming this [1] site's count of 10m fediverse's total users is accurate, Instagram would only need 2% of their ~500 DAU to sign up to surpass it; only 0.5% of their MAU. [1] https://the-federation.info/ https://the-federation.info/
- uptownfunk 3y agoInteresting product moves. Reinforce insta as a “platform” where features are now labeled as “apps”. Continues to reinforce engagement metrics at insta app level, so big win politically for the insta org inside meta. I’m sure a lot of promos coming down next cycle. Also very easy user acquisition since it piggy backs on existing insta user base. Insta maps more to the public facing vibe that Twitter does, whereas Facebook seems more for friends and family. Insta also more easily monetized than say WhatsApp, so the business moves all track. Overall curious to see what happens to the landscape. At a minimum it may leach away engagement from Twitter, so probably not very favorable for Twitter stock price.
- dlivingston 3y ago> ...it may leach away engagement from Twitter, so probably not very favorable for Twitter stock price. Fortunately Twitter is privately owned, so I think they will escape the market reactions this time. :)
- uptownfunk 3y agoAh, right. Thanks for clarifying that
- brucethemoose2 3y agoIf this gains traction, how long will it take for Meta to enshittify Threads? Facebook and Instagram have been stable, if nothing else... But I feel like Meta is under immense pressure to monetize users as more and more see the "Facebook is for old people and TikTok is draining Instagram" writing on the wall.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoOh, wait, this feels like the start of a cyberpunk story. If TikTok gets banned, where to the users go? Instagram. Threads could replace Twitter. Reddit is going downhill... Maybe Meta could even buy it in a firesale? Outside of chat apps like Discord, Slack, Teams and Telegram (which compete with WhatsApp), Meta will have consolidated most of the world's social media under them. And that's assuming they dont buy out Discord.
- aio2 3y agoYou could honestly be right.
- ducharmdev 3y agoThe beginnings of a western WeChat?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoI hate how right you are. I do my best to stay out of the Facebook ecosystem (although I am sure they have an extensive profile of my web activities). I am surprised they have not tried to make their own non-crypto financial system. Could embed it into restaurant storefronts and the marketplace.
- NovaDudely 3y agoOuch... yeah that sounds about right.
- menshiki 3y agoMeta does not have the support of legislators. The EU would regulate any service that would even aspire to become a Western WeChat way before they have any chance to succeed.
- jadtz 3y agoDoesnt EU already have somewhat of a WeChat, everybody uses whatsapp there. Definitely Meta already won that market.
- mullingitover 3y agoI'm calling it now, this is going to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion. I give twitter a couple of months once this launches, they'll do a Wile E Coyote where they walk off the cliff, followed by plummeting. Meta is going to grind the blue bird to a fine powder, not saying this as a Meta fan, just a casual observer. There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative, and so far Bluesky and Mastodon haven't been able to fulfill it due to scalability and network stickiness reasons. Meta can absorb all of twitter's traffic without breaking stride, and they'll have a userbase in the millions within hours of launch that's able to hop over from IG. RIP twitter, 2006-2023.
- prithvip 3y agoWow, this was prophetic. > they'll have a userbase in the millions within hours of launch that's able to hop over from IG. Well done on this prediction.
- IAmGraydon 3y agoYeah this was good timing on the part of Meta. Twitter is done.
- babl-yc 3y agoThe key thing for me is whether it's really a text focused app or they ruin it by trying to cross promote Instagram/Reels and turn it into a mindless time suck. If they get the little details right, I see this as the only real competition to Twitter right now. After trying Mastodon for a few months, it's certainly not it.
- delecti 3y agoAgreed. I think this succeeds or fails based on the ability to follow different kinds of things from users separately. If I can follow someone's Threads and not their Reels, I'd be glad to have such an easy migration path off of Twitter (I'm having a lot of fun on bluesky, but it's not ready). I'm not optimistic about that though, because you already can't choose to not follow reels separately from pictures.
- paxys 3y agoInteresting that it's an "Instagram app" and not a Meta app.
- LordShredda 3y agoBecause only losers use facebook. the cool kids use Instagram, a totally different thing
- cft 3y agoCool kids used Instagram till 2015. Now their parents use it, while they use TikTok
- jdm2212 3y agoThe parents are the ones with money to spend, which means they're the ones advertisers want.
- peruvian 3y agoA lot of young people are back on Facebook for Marketplace. It's the "app" a lot of people use nowadays to find cool second hand furniture.
- hbn 3y agoThat's literally the extent though. And a little bit for groups. But other than that, I don't know the last time myself or any of my friends have posted a status update. Maybe the occasional wedding announcement or baby photos, but it has to be that big of an event. And then the women get more active when they become moms, cause seemingly the family who skews older wants to see the babies.
- IAmGraydon 3y agoI’m guessing they’re going to try to meld the two together sometime down the road. Branding it as connected to Instagram now will make the transition less jarring.
- 3y ago
- encomiast 3y agoI like that there's some competition in this space. I wish it was someone else because I will never have a Facebook-controlled app on any of my devices again. I simply don't trust them. If it's available on the web and it gains traction, maybe I will use it.
- rabuse 3y agoI came across a smaller platform recently called Qwurty. https://qwurty.com https://qwurty.com
- u2077 3y agoLook at that app privacy report. I didn’t expect anything less from Meta. Let’s hope they aren’t using all our Mastodon accounts for advertising too.
- seaal 3y agoEvery possible category of information for a Twitter clone? Impressive.
- threeseed 3y agoWell I for one am actually looking forward to relevant ads. On Twitter I've been shown everything from industrial mining supplies, nipple covers, psychology research papers, super yachts, home shopping network junk and just now an ad for an oral dosing technology conference.
- aniforprez 3y agoTwitter is positively inundating me with "ads" from people boosting their twitter profiles, all dedicated to crypto, health "hacks", finance gurus, yoga teachers etc etc. I feel like Apple ads were the ones I saw most and now I've not seen an Apple ad in over a week. It really feels like advertisers are all pulling out
- astrange 3y agoThat's always happened to me; I think if you follow any doctors, it shows you ads for medical conferences, but I can't tell if that's Twitter messing up or the people placing the ads setting the display audiences wrong.
- sangnoir 3y agoDid Twitter always show you the same drop-shipper ad multiple times on the same thread? I'd be mad if I were an advertiser on Twitter, some of those ad impressions feel fraudulent to me, as a user.
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- publius_0xf3 3y agoI was never able to create an Instagram account because Instagram would just instantly ban any account I created for paranoid anti-spam reasons. Apparently this is [a common problem](https://old.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/85wbk1/banned_immediately_upon_account_creation/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/85wbk1/banned_im...). So I'm not looking forward to trying to sign up with them.
- neop1x 3y agoSame here. Banned instantly for no reason. The problem is that some official entities like Fire departments are using these closed for-profit services and at the same time those services are adding login screens even for just read access.
- poly_morphis 3y agoHad the same experience with Facebook. Looking back, I’m glad it happened that way.
- gochi 3y agoThey also instantly reverse that if you follow the email prompt/mobile prompt. No idea why they decided to handle anti-spam that way.
- moneywoes 3y agoCan you elaborate please? I verified the phone number to no avail
- CameronNemo 3y agoYeah but it feels a bit like being negged. Like they can't just say "this is the process to make an account". They have to say " you are faaaakkeee prove to me you're real!".
- spike021 3y agoI have a few accounts for various things (personal account, hobby, another hobby). Recently I tried probably 10 separate times to create a fourth one not even linked to those three, and Instagram outright refused to let me do it with any email address. It even got to a point where on the browser I tried making the account it refuses to let me log in with my normal accounts these days.
- sergiotapia 3y agoI think Facebook/Instagrams very "PC-model" of moderation will allow for Twitter to coexist with them. There's a tangible difference in Twitter now that Musk took over. Raunchy, sometimes offensive jokes are now actually possible on the site. I use Twitter a lot more than I ever did because of it. I don't want Instagram 2.0 with nothing but "models" and stolen videos.
- chrjxnandns 3y ago[dead]
- zht 3y agoIt’s funny because below most trending tweets there’s like 85 only fans “models” writing clickbait comments
- sergiotapia 3y agoTrue but the algorithm seems to be getting better at being filtered out entirely from my views on Twitter.
- djur 3y agoThere have been raunchy, offensive jokes on Twitter for years. Nothing new there. What kind of kneeslappers have you found more of recently?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- coolandsmartrr 3y agoReminds me of how Instagram absorbed Snapchat usecases with stories. Instagram tackled the competition for ephemeral stories simply by implementing Stories as a feature. This time, Threads is a fully fledged app. Getting users to adopt a new app might take as much time as getting Messenger installed. Still, Instagram has a robust social graph to lead users towards downloading it. In fact, they seem to have already onboarded users when they implemented part of Threads with the status update feature in the Instagram messages view. Twitter will probably remain used by relatively "anti-social" people. In the States, that may be by politicized users, fueled by Elon's freedom fighting. Here in Japan, Twitter is very popular because of the sense of anonymity, coupled with the use of Kanji characters that achieves concision within 140 characters. Instagram might be too social for us (esp. male older than 25). It will probably pain me to see the diaspora of users among many microblogging services. The transition to a new microblogging hub may be painful for both Twitter Inc (ie. X Corp) and Twitter users. It's funny to see that Threads is the re-implementation of Facebook status updates before news articles swamped the Newsfeed. Meta's microblogging came back full circle.
- spike021 3y agoI'm really interested in seeing what my Japanese friends do. I don't live in Japan but have made a bunch of friends there in my travels. They're super active on Twitter for baseball and car discussion. Hoping they make the jump, honestly. At least if this app is good.
- coolandsmartrr 3y agoTwitter is a much better social network in Japanese than in English. You are more likely to encounter people who want to discuss hobbies than being trolls. I think they'll stick to the end, just like the Titanic. Making the jump seems a little challenging right now. Some Japanese people have tried Truth Social, even dominating the trends with Japanese keywords. I'm not sure if they'll stick there given its context with American politics. As Twitter became popular in Japan with the 2011 Earthquake, the migration to Threads might be another earthquake away (which happens often here).[1] I wonder who will be the core users of Threads in Japan. Twitter was popular among nerdy "Otakus" who often engaged in anime, gaming, or electronics. Facebook/Instagram always tended to be avoided by that demographics. Instead, Instagram in Japan is popular among young women, who post selfies or food pics. However, I'm not sure if they'll be receptive to a text-focused service. [1] Side-anecdote: Twitter is the best earthquake detector. Whenever you feel a shake, Twitter users will confirm it sooner than traditional news sources.
- roughly 3y agoI’d really love to see some actual creativity out of the biggest names in the industry, instead of this endless regurgitation of whatever idea got the tiniest bit of traction most recently.
- jdm2212 3y agoCreativity is for startups. If you run the 8th or so most valuable company on the planet, your competitive advantage is mostly your scale. You should mostly be using that to maximize return on proven stuff (either by buying or copying proven things), not pissing away billions of dollars on stuff that a startup can iterate on for a tiny fraction of that price.
- roughly 3y agoThat’s an incredibly depressing way to run a world. What on earth is a billion dollars for if not doing something interesting?
- ramones13 3y agoMetaverse? Llama? They’re doing both. How well they’re doing those is up for debate, but they’re doing interesting stuff too.
- jdm2212 3y agoMetaverse is exactly my point -- they've incinerated vast amounts of investor money with nothing to show for it. They could've and should've just plowed that money into hundreds of startups. LLAMA is also exactly my point -- LLMs are pretty well-proven at this point. If you spend $X on machine learning researchers, you can get an LLM with Y parameters that is useful for various tasks like sentiment analysis, machine translation, etc. Facebook should be spending money on that because they have lots of cash, data centers, and ML researchers so they can do this at scale that only a few others can (Google, Microsoft/OpenAI and maybe Amazon).
- Banditoz 3y agoI'm not too familiar with mobile app dev but why is the app 254 MB? I just compiled a 3rd-party Android Reddit app with a different oauth client_id and the apk was 18 MB. What are they packing in there?!
- skydhash 3y agoAssets and Libraries. I remember including the Firebase Libraries in your react native app more than double its size because of gRPC or something. Not a lot of places care about size optimization anymore (looking at MW Warzone and every electron apps)
- NelsonMinar 3y agoAndroid apps are significantly smaller than iOS apps.
- timeon 3y agoProbably webapp.
- fire 3y agoGreat, another social media platform that won't have any form of support team. Twitter at least had one you could actually talk to before Elon took over, but Instagram has lacked support contact methods for years at this point. Using a platform where you have no recourse or even method of reaching out if something goes awry is always a dangerous game to play :(
- robertwt7 3y agoTwitter will take a big hit from this.. given the current situation, will reddit take a big hit as well? it's definitely an interesting time where both blue bird and reddit users are looking for alternatives. Meta has a good track record of running social app, this can be a really successful product with the launch timing if the app fulfil the mass requirements from both sides
- gochi 3y agoReddit will continue to take several hits from their own weird decisions, I don't see how Threads will have much of an impact there. Not unless they start repurposing Facebook Groups features to encourage that same sort of community aspect to topics.
- bathtub365 3y agoI wonder how their logged out web experience will be. I think Twitter has historically (until recently) been very permissive about letting anyone view and embed content from the site and I think that’s helped it become more socially pervasive. Instagram is really popular but has typically locked down the web experience unless you log in.
- MetricExpansion 3y agoThis was the social network that was supposed to support ActivityPub, right? So… maybe logged out support will be good? I’m still not holding my breath though.
- willmeyers 3y agoLooks good and clean. I'll probably use it over Twitter/Reddit.
- zzzeek 3y agoim there. Twitter just announced that they are going to force people to pay for a disgusting "im an idiot" blue checkmark to use tweetdeck, and that is it, we all hate Facebook and Meta but after what Twitter has become, a total cesspool of right wing hatebot accounts and Elon-fellating, Zuck is like a welcome sight.
- john_max_1 3y agoWhen was the last time, Facebook launched a successful standalone product? - WhatsApp - acqusition - Instagram - acquistion - Messenger - acquisition - Oculus - acquisition Facebook has DNA to optimize feeds. It, simply, lack the DNA to build good products from scratch. My gut feeling no one will care about Threads, 6 months from now. EDIT: - Facebook was all-in on cryptocurrencies. The project is fully gone. - Facebook was all-in on Messenger as a platform. The project is gone as well. - Facebook also launched dating a few years back. That project is dead too. - Someone pointed out in comments that Feed & Like as a concept was also based out of an acquisition called FriendFeed - https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-acquires-friendfeed/
- tedunangst 3y agoWhat was Messenger before acquisition?
- john_max_1 3y agohttps://techcrunch.com/2011/03/01/facebook-beluga/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/03/01/facebook-beluga/
- mtrpcic 3y agoAll of your examples are unique, distinct separate product and problem spaces, whereas Threads is pretty aligned with Instagram as-is. A lot of the plumbing for Instagram is likely reusable for threads, and a lot of the same optimization techniques might apply just as well (or with minor tweaks). I don't think this is as much "launch something new" as it is "instagram with a mask on".
- john_max_1 3y agoSo. multiple attempts at cloning Snap, HouseParty, IRL etc. into standalone products were unique. And this one is just a minor tweak on Instagram? Let's discuss this in another 6 months. I can't predict what the future of Twitter is, but Threads would have been shuttered by then.
- 1270018080 3y agoThe following data may be collected and linked to your identity: Health & Fitness Purchases Financial Info Location Contact Info Contacts User Content Search History Browsing History Identifiers Usage Data Sensitive Info Diagnostics Other Data
- GSimon 3y agoFor those racing to call this an end to Twitter, remember which platform allows you to post spicy pics.
- IAmGraydon 3y agoWill this also take some of Reddit’s market? If so, Meta was just given a golden opportunity that couldn’t have fallen together more perfectly.
- keyle 3y agoWait, where is the web version? A big part of twitter is the web client... and embedded tweets all over the internet. Did they start this product by cloning instagram and removing the image centric approach? Why is this not a website first? My gut feel is that this competes as much with instagram as it does with Twitter.
- vineyardmike 3y agoInstagram has a web version, and the ability to HTML embed instagram posts, so it seems likely that this will have a web version.
- keyle 3y agoHave you tried to use the instagram web version though? It used to be better, getting incrementally worse on purpose every "redesign". It's borderline web hostile.
- thrdbndndn 3y agoInstagram's web version has a serious bug that when you scroll down fast enough, it constantly loads the same content again and again. This bug has been there for months and basically renders it unusable.
- tech234a 3y agoAnother bug I've had several times on the web version is that when I open the account privacy settings page the "Private account" checkbox will load for a few seconds and then change my account from private to public. Quite annoying especially since that also approves all pending following requests. I don't know if they fixed in the last few months but I'm kind of afraid to check.
- pcchristie 3y agoI wondered if this was just me because I use Opera. It's awful.
- dhruval 3y agoTried to install it but it was asking for too much irrelevant data so I decided not to. Maybe I am not the avenge user I don’t need an IOS app for text, web is fine.
- granzymes 3y agoI would've been impressed had you installed it considering it isn't available until July 6th.
- ko3us 3y agoFrom the very limited screenshots, it looks like the IG team have done a great job with the UX. If they stay true to this and keep it focused, I think this will be the winner. Focused UX is something I feel has been really lost by many apps coming out today.
- hiisukun 3y agoMaybe I missed something, but what's the equivalent of subreddits on Threads? I can see how I might discover posts from users that I follow or like -- but I actually don't ever do that on reddit. I just occasionally visit subreddits of topics that interest me, and that's a loose collection of users/content based on geography or interest or otherwise. I feel like hashtags (where you can put them on any message you want) aren't quite the same thing, but maybe that's just because it makes cross-posting more of a blended experience, where I can't tell if replies are linked to the #localcitynearme or the #coffee tag. Their example post about the coffee shop is a great example -- I might be interested in the discussion if it was near me, in which case comments of other coffee shops around the corner might be fantastic. But if I was reading the post because I follow that user for their singing in a jazz band that I listen to, and I live in a different country, it's just total noise that I wouldn't want to read. I've only viewed the 'web app store' page and not the real app store page, maybe there are more details there.
- nemothekid 3y agoI'm pretty sure Threads is a replacement for Twitter, not Reddit
- hiisukun 3y agoHow silly of me! I guess I was hoping for both, somehow. A kind of fever dream where adding site:threads.fediverse.instagram.com to searches works for finding useful human generated content..
- saurik 3y agoFWIW, I feel like that's the next step: there is a natural mapping from Twitter's data model to reddit's and Meta already has experience handing over the moderation keys to sub-communities from Groups on Facebook; that will also make the existence of this separate app really become powerful.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoIf this is any good I’ll 100% switch off of Twitter
- l33tc0de 3y agoJust like all those who have mastodon links on their twitter profile and still complaining on twitter
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoYou can’t tip over a vending machine by yourself with one push Ya gotta rock it
- cm2012 3y agoI'm so excited for this an advertiser. Twitter ads are so bad. Meta ads are the best in the industry.
- tommoor 3y agoSeeing as it wasn't linked yet: https://www.threads.net https://www.threads.net looks like where this will live on the web
- I_am_tiberius 3y agothreads.com must have 100xed in value the past hour.
- owlbynight 3y agoI won't be using this unless it has a web app, and without an Android app, they're freezing out a lot of people who could contribute. This won't go anywhere. BlueSky is just fine.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- red_trumpet 3y agoThere is an Android app in the pipes: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instagram.barcelona&gl=it https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instagram....
- I_am_tiberius 3y agoI fear that they make you sign-in in order to view content. This wouldn't make it better than Twitter, as it is now.
- astrea 3y agoFacebook buys Instagram then make a Facebook knockoff by Instagram
- dzink 3y agoThe privacy listing is once again atrocious and a deal breaker for me. Health data? Browsing history? Financial Info? Purchases? Location? Sensitive info? Hell no!!!
- eldenring 3y agoI'd be surprised if 99.9% of the targeted userbase of this app cares about this. I don't.
- perceptronas 3y agoI suspect after some time this will fail and will get merged back to Instagram. Instagram is already a "twitter" app they have. I think IG idea is even better: tweet with image. Of course, they messed it up big time with various anti-consumer measures. Why would this be any different? I am also wondering, if Threads fail – what do they lose? Its the same with Notes of Substack. If Notes fail in 2 years – can they continue? I imagine they already felt negative effect of their move.
- 0x53 3y agoAs others have said, I’m sure this will do really well and is probably close to the final straw for Twitter. I just wish it wasn’t being produced by meta. I really hope that a non-meta competitor is able to gain significant market share.
- firebirdn99 3y agoOh Zuck def sensed the opportunity!
- bkishan 3y agoThe logo is eerily similar to the Tamil letter 'ku'. Can anyone confirm if thats the case or what the logo is supposed to mean?
- Torkel 3y agoI don't get this at all. To me it seems like it will obviously fail. 1. Twitter is all about who is there. How will they make people start posting on this? 2. New platforms take off because they innovate, not because they do what others do but slightly tweaked. 3. I have a really hard time seeing people mass escaping twitter to this du to morals. Facebook/Zuck is just as reviled as Twitter/Musk. If not more reviled. Mastodon has the moral high ground, but still can't take off.
- captaincrowbar 3y ago1. Facebook has more than 10 times as many users as Twitter. They don't need to add new users, they just need to make it easy for FB users to also use Threads. 2. But the whole point here is that others aren't doing this any more. Threads isn't supposed to be an innovation, just a Twitter replacement. Twitter is dying, Mastodon is too complicated for non-geeks, BlueSky could have been a contender but they didn't get their act together quickly enough. 3. You're in a geek information bubble here. On the scale of social media, almost nobody cares about that sort of thing. I'd bet money that the overwhelming majority of FB users have never even heard of Zuckerberg.
- Torkel 3y ago1. The people who are possible users of something like this are already on Twitter. The target audience is not all of Facebook, so not 10x. 2. I have seen data that can be used to argue Twitter is slipping. But to claim Twitter is dying is a great exaggeration, based on data. There are perhaps cases where a company will totally mess up something and a replacement can take over, but this doesn't seem to be it. 3. Well, hard to tell. To me the geek information bubble is the conviction that Twitter is dying. Also, I think Zuckerberg is a lot more famous that you account for. But I could not find data on it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shreyshnaccount 3y agoReally liked the last time they offered this app (only to subsequently pull it)
- 29athrowaway 3y agoNot to be confused with the 1984 film, Threads. A film about life before, during and after a fictional nuclear attack.
- imbnwa 3y agoIs Instagram still the place for amateur and pro photography? Has something else emerged I don't know about?
- slimebot80 3y agoI get it: Twitter is under pressure Love it. But, I generally feel social media is dying in far bigger ways thank just these dilutions. People don't trust it, and are caring far less. They hey-day and the novelty has completely worn of for the majority who are not narcissistic enough to put the energy in to arguing or self-promoting. Reality is here to stay!
- ChatGTP 3y agoThe only reason I like anything on Instagram anymore is because I feel sorry for my friends who are on their honeymoon and think anyone cares about their posts. They're my friends so I just randomly click like on their posts while inside I think to myself, why the fuck don't you just get off your phone and enjoy your holiday? I mean, I'm obviously happy their having fun, but I'm sad they think it's important to show everyone what they're doing 5 times a day. I have some other friends who are semi-pro athletes and the same thing, I "like" their posts only really because they want people to care. Aside from that, it's something I look at while on the toilet for 5 minutes and then put it away.
- noveltyaccount 3y agoCan I just say: I love that logo. It's an @ but it's not. Well done.
- m3kw9 3y agoAs opposed to “A Facebook App”
- darklycan51 3y agoI'm not touching anything by Zuckerberg again, nice try though
- crossroadsguy 3y agoAs someone who doesn’t have an Instagram or Facebook account, it’d be DoA for me right? Or the shadow account counts?
- m3kw9 3y agoI’m calling it, network effects are very hard to overcome. Users with thousands of follows will have to wait a loooong time to have Threads side to catch up. In the mean time they will absolutely use Twitter along with Threads and the one likely getting abandoned is Threads. New users will find empty content, mostly discussions that are already on twitter but at a small scale and reach
- cosmiccatnap 3y agoI think the real longcon of this is to seed people into a TikTok competitor using the existing meta user base who will gladly give it a try initially. It will catch plenty of the Twitter crowd and even reddit crowd but that's just a coincidence of the state of those platforms. Long term I think it will be to agrigate their more active users away from Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat into something that provides the lowest common denominator of all of them so they can slowly erode them as part of the Embrace Extend Extinguish playbook taking a cue from M$ They took the best engineers and lessons learned from the platforms they bought but ideally they don't want to maintain products that do 80% of the same functions
- aml702 3y ago[dead]
- zmmmmm 3y agoWill be interesting to see how much this is a genuine business for Facebook vs just an opportunistic dig at Twitter/Musk. It's actually been kind of weird watching all the big tech just stand to the side while Twitter implodes.
- web3-is-a-scam 3y agoTwitter is terrible now but no way in hell am I jumping ship to a Meta product.
- throwaway290 3y agoI have Threads on my phone. for a long time I was using it exclusively instead of the trash fire that is Instagram app. But for more than a year now it says it was discontinued at start, and I cannot login again. I am so likely to use Threads from Instagram /s
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoIf people didn’t abandon Twitter for Facebook posts, why would they flee to Instagram Threads?
- vegcel 3y agoA few reasons I could see 1.) Instagram brand is much stronger than Facebooks 2.) Instagram follows some similar design and user experience patterns to twitter, i.e. username based account, people using stories a lot of times as mostly a text based posting platform, etc 3.) Celebrities and newspeople already use instagram for updates, so the transition would be natural 4.) Twitter has never been in a weaker position with the site being limited
- dado3212 3y agoCannot believe that they have a second stand-alone IG spinoff app, and they ALSO called it Threads[0]. [0]. https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/17/instagram-will-shut-down-its-companion-app-threads-by-year-end/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/17/instagram-will-shut-down-i...
- xeromal 3y agohaha, wow. That is impressive.
- coolandsmartrr 3y agoThat's really cool. Someone from that project must've been really attached to the name. It's interesting that Facebook/Instagram keeps launching new apps to identify new usecases. Most of them rarely gets heard of, but perhaps they gain a lot of insight even when they shut down. On the flip side, I hope it's not like Google where services are launched to die soon for the sake of enhancing a promo package.
- quickthrower2 3y agoThats Google level of shutdowns!
- jadtz 3y agoNo its not, Google kills projects before they even mature. META kills them when they are already dead.
- dbbk 3y agoOh there have been many more spinoff IG apps. Boomerang, Hyperlapse, and IGTV.
- nothrowaways 3y agoThe name "threads" doesn't sound catchy.
- nothrowaways 3y agoTwitter competitor is the Facebook app. Everything you do on Twitter can be done on Facebook app. I don't see any use of the threads app. People don't come to Twitter because of the app.
- nothrowaways 3y agoFacebook can't build a Twitter competitor
- alphabet9000 3y agonice, inspired me to write a guide on how to delete your threads account https://jollo.org/LNT/public/delete_threads_account.html https://jollo.org/LNT/public/delete_threads_account.html
- andsoitis 3y agotwitter is a feature
- avinoth 3y agoAs others here pointed out, Meta does not have a good history of launching completely new products separately and succeeding in it (except FB ofc). So it’s a wait and see. If they’re going to ride on the coattails of the existing influencers, might make more sense to keep it a feature than a brand new app. The existing influencers would have no extra incentive to spend efforts on a whole new app if they’re addressing the same audience and won’t be gaining new set of audience. Or keep it completely new to excite new wannabe influencers and they will put in the extra effort and drive activity at the beginning.
- guybedo 3y agoas much as i dislike Facebook/Meta and its galaxy, there's a need for a viable alternative to Twitter especially now with this rate limit debacle. Not only there's this limit but they also broke Tweetdeck which is the only way to really use Twitter
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- modernerd 3y ago“Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, like Mastodon. They can also find you with your full username @username@threads.net.” [1] Did not expect Fediverse integration from Meta. [1] https://9to5google.com/2023/07/03/threads-instagram-app-countdown-plus-details/ https://9to5google.com/2023/07/03/threads-instagram-app-coun...
- arianvanp 3y agoThey used to run an XMPP bridge on chat.facebook.com
- manojlds 3y agoUsed to being the keyword.
- sequoia 3y agoYeah talk about good old days. Pidgin or Adium (or Finch, in the terminal), I could have google chat, facebook chat, and even IRC in one app. Throw OTR plugin on that & I we had end to end chat encryption over google & facebook. Very sad day when they shut these down.
- hyperdimension 3y agoAgreed. As an interesting look at the human side of technology decisions, Google dropped XMPP federation the year after I graduated high school, leaving me extremely isolated from all my friends once we went our separate ways.
- Breza 3y agoAgreed! Facebook was a very open platform, especially pre-newsfeed.
- luckystarr 3y agoPeople on the Fediverse expected it very much. Meta already was trying to talk to the larger instances "off the record"[1]. Fediverse users are already planning to boycott any instance which federates with Meta to block any Embrace, Extend and Extinguish moves. [1] https://fosstodon.org/@kev/110592625692688836 https://fosstodon.org/@kev/110592625692688836 edit: More info here: https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/fedipact-blocking-meta/ https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/fedipact-blocking-meta/
- seydor 3y agoInstagram 's ? Why not Facebook's? And why does Instagram need a whole new app for text posts? Are we about to see a hacker news for image posts?
- andrewstuart 3y agoIt’s a mistake to relate it to other meta products like inatagramz
- jokoon 3y agoThey need a new name, that thing is not going to be popular
- toastal 3y agoInstagram booted my account for looking too suspicious. To reactivate the account they wanted me to send a 3D video selfie to verify myself, but that company doesn’t need those sorts of head scans on me. Nope. Account is gone & I’ll never return.
- didip 3y agoWow, the stars aligned and shined on Mark Zuckerberg. What a lucky break. Mark my words, the Meta revival story starts now thanks to Twitter and Reddit killing themselves. I think Meta will realize that it is best to stick with what they are good at: Building profitable apps via social interactions.
- bakugo 3y agoI can tell just by the name alone that this is going to flop pretty hard.
- annadane 3y agoThe problem with Facebook's products always comes down to one overriding fact, Zuckerberg's desire to win over everybody else; he's constantly been accused of stealing from people, it's not a surprise everything he owns is either extremely coercive or broken from a technical standpoint
- pmlnr 3y ago"Threads"? Really? Just to have it confused with Thread, the protocol, right?
- yoavm 3y agoI actually have a feeling not that many people around the world will be confused between this and an IPv6 based low-power mesh networking protocol for IoT devices.
- 12907835202 3y agoI find it funny that everyone's saying the screenshots look like a Twitter clone. It looks like Facebook to me. I imagine this is as much about capturing the young people not using Facebook as it is about rivaling Twitter, if not more.
- ath0 3y agoIf by any chance you’re the graphic designer who picked South Williamsburg hotspots for the iOS preview screenshots… well, hi neighbor! Good choices.
- remote_phone 3y agoI wish they would update their Hyperlapse app, it was the best at what it did but hasn’t worked in years.
- throw_m239339 3y agoCirca 2006: OMG Facebook killed Myspace, Facebook is so great. Circa 2010's: Facebook sucks, let's all move to Twitter Circa 2023:OMG Threads killed Twitter, Threads is so great Circa 2030's: Threads is so lame, let's all move to something else
- dirtyid 3y agoAny word on character limit? So tired of aggregating 1/50 threads using threadreader.
- lqs469 3y agoIf this new app support Web platform perfectly as well like twitter, It could be a bomb. Can't deny that, Previous Twitter devs built the Twitter Web app at a really high level in some way (eg. whatever the PWA tech or UX/UI details). But backwards to today, this previous creature is dying for some reason or someone's reason.
- sizzle 3y agoThe amount of user “app privacy data” listed on the App Store page is nauseating.
- rcarmo 3y agoCurrrently not available in my country or region (I’m in Europe)
- foooorsyth 3y agoAnyone interested in talking about the product decisions instead of Musk/Zuck hate? - Interesting that they went with a stand-alone app instead of baking this into IG like they did with Stories (which killed Snap overnight). I wonder how much they’ll advertise the download inside of IG. - Can’t say I like the name. Doesn’t evoke much emotion in me. The term “thread” is rarely used by normies without the word “Twitter” in front of it. And the choice of the plural form is interesting. - The logo looks like it belongs to an app that should start with the letter ‘a’. Confusing that they go with a t-word like Twitter but then make the logo look like a different letter. Also, no color? Will it really stay black and white or will it adopt the IG gradient?
- cubefox 3y agoThe logo looks like the letters C and a. I wonder whether this is intentional.
- tommit 3y agoWhat would have been the intention?
- blurrybird 3y agoThe logo is an @ with a very strange choice of typeface. Probably a nod to the @username format that Twitter made so popular.
- deaddodo 3y ago@ was used to reference people looooong before Twitter popularized it. In fact, it was users on Twitter already using the paradigm that made the engineers integrate it. Same as hashtags.
- justinator 3y agoI don't seem to remember that. Where was that used? The closest I can think is email, which is where I thought Twitter borrowed it. I remember hashtags being popularized first by Flickr (maybe @mentions were too?)
- thefounder 3y agoThe app name is bad. It won't be succesful.
- ChicagoDave 3y agoI already don’t trust Meta. I’m not giving them more angles to accumulate personal data.
- ChicagoDave 3y agoTwo qualifiers. I did reserve my full name so it’s not misused and I did sign up with my startup company for marketing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Cwizard 3y agoI think it is surprising they went with the Instagram branding. Instagram has a better brand reputation than Facebook but I would also say that the brand image is still more for young and fun content, less serious things. Which I would think appeals more to younger people 20-35yo. While what makes twitter great is that it is a more serious platform where you can get the ‘insight’ of professionals (journalists, politicians, etc). That being said, Twitter’s brand is in the toilet right now. Maybe that is enough for this to attract people. I do wonder what the alternative would be? Whatsapp branding? Feels off too… Would it have been better to use a new brand?
- esskay 3y agoThis _could_ be a twitter competitor. But the instance of bundling it with Instagram is what will ensure it fails. Meta have absolutely no common sense when it comes to understanding their audience. If you're going to take on Twitter why on earth would you make Instagram a part of that when the two share nothing in common.
- gemstones 3y agoCould it be that you don’t understand Instagram? My circle of friends all rely on Instagram for announcements (mostly local) in addition to seeing updates/photos/etc. Twitter just underserved this market, and Meta realized that Instagram does serve this market, badly. Right now my local politicians have to put their text posts in a square image on a story, but it would be more convenient for them and me if they could post in a text format to their existing Instagram audience. What I expect to happen is for Instagram to expose how bad Twitter was at converting potential users, rather than for Twitter to expose that Instagram users have no overlap with their use case.
- Mo7amedsd 3y agoN
- noelrock 3y agoI can definitely see a gap in the market for this now. The present Twitter alternatives (Mastodon, Bluesky, Spoutible) are just too hobbyist or finicky. Meta will presumably bring an ease-of-use to this service and, crucially, scale from minute 1. They're the building blocks of Twitter's current incumbency position, and Meta/Threads can replicate them straight out the gate. That is a huge advantage. On the other side of the ledger, the utility of Twitter keeps sliding. Not sure how many Hacker News users are Twitter users or what the crossover is, but the whole blue tick 'thing' has reduced the utility in one key surprising way: high quality replies under popular accounts are impossible to find. It's like if you could buy upvotes on Hacker News to get to the top almost. Secondarily to that is the stuff over the last few days with very low rate limits on how many tweets you can view - if you can't use a social network, it tends to stop being useful. While I wouldn't say Threads is a slam dunk guaranteed success, I would say it's the most probable contender of all the ones out there.
- lordgrenville 3y agoA lot of discussion about whether Meta can execute or not. Regardless, if this does succeed, I hope the FTC will have something to say.
- shreyshnaccount 3y ago- Monopolistic apps are problematic and unreliable for users - Need for an open standard for communication on these apps, similar to UPI in India for transactions - These apps are used like utilities but governed as services. It is effectively impossible to exist without big tech products right now, as an individual and as a business. We need to fight for digital rights. - Communication should be as essential a utility, like water and electricity. - Centralized apps have too much power over the internet - Google was useless when Reddit went down - one clown (Musk) should not have an outsized control on the means of communication. He can't cut my water, and he shouldn't be allowed to cut my communication. - alternatives are impractical and small and as long as big tech is allowed to throw money and kill/acquire/impede smaller apps we have a problem - A democratised communication standard would eliminate the need to use specific apps like WhatsApp or Twitter for communication and information. - this will allow the web to fulfill one of its most important functions, which is, being searchable and archivable. - profit incentives do not align for big tech to make the internet we want. Small tech will make the internet we deserve.
- zenmaster10665 3y agoThe issue with this theory is that there is no obvious way to have both deep interoperability between apps as well as innovation. Interoperability is a contract,and that contract will slow down product evolution and lead to worse consumer products.
- lopis 3y agoMaybe it's time we decide what's better for us in the long term, and accept slower innovation?
- shreyshnaccount 3y agoThat's certainly not true. Interoperability for basic features such as text, photos, videos, posts and comments doesn't mean apps are not free to add more features. Also, having an extendable framework will easily account for this
- 3y ago
- timeon 3y agoWhy app in Twitter domain needs my health & fitness data?
- jwmoz 3y agoOf all the alternatives though for the love of god why Facebook
- amne 3y agoI have only this to say: there are not photoshop nazis. But grammar nazis .. oh boy
- Uptrenda 3y agoI'm so tired of chat apps. Every chat app is the same crap done over and over again... But apparently its 'new' and you need to download it because its the only one X uses, yayyyy. It's like scheduling: the problem was solved already but everyones obsessed with redoing them. Does anyone who works on apps / software / whatever ever consider how tiring it is to have to adopt all this sheet? It's like the digital equivalent of fashion. Literally just waxes and wanes between apps that are all functionally the same based on trends.
- bruh2 3y agoThis is extremely tiring, especially since: 1. Important info is hosted on these platforms 2. It's impossible to look this info up. Their internal search functions feel like their optimized for finding distracting shit rather than finding what you were actually looking for. I hate it with a burning passion, and I secretly wish for all of these companies to be nationalized and have like 90% of their features deprecated. I hate having my attention abused like that. It's too much hassle and FOMO to uninstall these apps, and I need like 3 external tools to limit my usage to sane volumes. This is not a top-priotity problem at all, nor one that I think of frequently (just an hour a day), yet I can't fathom how some higher-ups waste their lives thinking of these shticks
- phtrivier 3y agoFrom the bottom of my heart, I hope as many of us as possible will, someday, get a chance to replace the time spent either "on" or "thinking about" the Twitter kind of "addictive, adverstisement supported, high-engagement requiring, tribe re-inforcing, data-siphoning, public discourse worsening" kind of social media. (To be clear: I'm 100% expecting "Threads" to become that in the short-to-medium term, unless they have some specific moderation techniques in place.) This won't make your life "great", mind me. I'm pretty sure it will make it better. Good luck.
- jug 3y agoThis is going to be very interesting to watch, and I honestly... For all I think about Meta as a company, I have to congratulate them on the timing. They probably pushed hard to meet this deadline the past few weeks in order to coincide with the controversial Twitter decisions lately. Elon Musk is rolling out the red mat for Zuckerberg. It's fun to see tech giants fight it out like this! Reminds me of the Bill Gates vs Steve Jobs days! Having said that, the cultures on Instagram and Twitter are no doubt different. So it's hard for me to tell what will transpire here. However, how much of these cultural differences are due to Instagram not having had a live text feed for breaking news etc. before? And how malleable is social network culture? Threads will also move Instagram closer to Twitter with this. I think how well Meta suceeeds at this is vital to how much of a threat to Twitter this is going to be. Not only this app itself needs to find users; for a real threat they also need to use it for similar things as on Twitter, e.g. politics, a controversial celebrity post here and there, breaking news on the Ukrainian war, earthquakes, imploding submarines... Finally, I wonder how this will affect Facebook! With both a photo feed, a TikTok-style reels feed, Snapchat-like stories, and Twitter-like Threads... This app that is NOT Facebook is certainly starting to look very complete indeed. Facebook is big where I live so I "need" to be on it to stay in touch, but I can see myself residing more and more on Messages and Marketplace alone, now more than ever.
- netheril96 3y agoPurely from self interest, I hope this wins over Twitter. So I installed it and made an account. When Elon Musk laid off more than 80% of Twitter's workforce (or maybe 90%, the number is quickly increasing), many people said this would prove that a company needed only a handle of software engineers to be successful. If they are correct, it paints a bleak future where software engineer jobs will be forever cut down. I hope Twitter falls so it proves the reverse: a software company cannot survive without enough engineers. While Facebook also laid people off, the percentage is much lower than Twitter. It will be even better if Facebook has to recruit people to win this battle.
- greyman 3y agoInterestingly, it seems to me Elon was mostly right. Overall, twitter is doing just fine, everything runs for me, influencers from the fields I follow like AI or software engineering are still there, still posting regularly. From people I follow, I didn't notice anyone leaving.
- thih9 3y agoLooks like they're reusing the name of their messaging app (also "Threads"), that was live between 2019 [1] and 2021 [2]. Nature abhors a vacuum, I guess. [1]: https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/introducing-threads-app/ https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/introducing-t... [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/17/22787783/instagram-threads-shutting-down-meta-messaging https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/17/22787783/instagram-threa...
- tomashubelbauer 3y agoNot to mention this new Slack competitor: https://threads.com https://threads.com. If Instagram Threads takes off I fully expect this app will be forced to change its name by Meta.
- agilob 3y agoData Linked to You The following data may be collected and linked to your identity: Health & Fitness Purchases Financial Info Location Contact Info Contacts User Content Search History Browsing History Identifiers Usage Data Sensitive Info Diagnostics Other Data wow ok...
- nmcela 3y agoI hate everything about this. Everything Meta touches turns to dystopian shit.
- theshrike79 3y ago"Not available in your country or region" Not a Twitter killer after all. Or any kind of killer.
- erremerre 3y agoMy question is, after the twitter fiasco, there is a number of competitors, like skyblue or this threads that have been created to remplace it (I dont count Mastodon, because it was not created to remplaced, but as an open alternative). Why absolutely no big company (MS, facebook, google, amazon, etc...) is attempting the same with Reddit? Not even discord has done any single change to try to steal any userbase from it.
- Vinnl 3y agoFacebook Groups competes with Reddit, I think.
- PossiblyKyle 3y agoIt is, and it’s even more popular than reddit in my local communities. The problem is the lack of anonymity
- erremerre 3y agoDo you mind to prove some example of communities popular? Sorry but I haven't had facebook since 2016 and I literally have no idea what is going on with it.
- PossiblyKyle 3y agoI don't live in the US. We have groups for uni, the tech sector (in general, kind of like /r/programming in a way), ML&DL, dating, sales (alongside Facebook Marketplace). We also have groups for towns and neighborhoods as the prime way for the locals to communicate. It is de-facto reddit here
- erremerre 3y agoKind of, but you need to identify yourself with a facebook account that is linked to your name. Probably not the best idea if you are trying to form a community like r/piracy or r/watches where you could remain unidentified
- victor22 3y agoTwitter = free speech Meta = lol
- minroot 3y agoThe way I like to see it, Facebook think of itself as a humanitarian company working mostly in the developing an underdeveloped countries providing them internet communication services.
- ranting-moth 3y agoAn app I have to install is not going to be a twitter killer. If you want to kill twitter, you have to be more open in every way than twitter.
- saos 3y ago"An Instagram app" LOL almost forgot that Meta owns Instagram. Nice try Facebook! #deleteFacebook
- santiagobasulto 3y agoAny details about what APIs would be available?
- AzulMarino 3y ago[dead]
- varispeed 3y agoIt's game over for Twitter when they allow terrorist content and block people questioning and reporting it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- valeg 3y agoI think, the time is right for Zuck's move. He's very determined. This social media space is getting competitive and interesting.
- etchalon 3y agoWho is the target audience for this app? Influence bloggers who need to issue public apologies?
- steveBK123 3y agoA lot of people are going to have to think slightly more about their posturing. 2021-2023 social media rotating villain vs 2016-2020 social media rotating villain. Oh what's that, I'm hearing a new villain, Mr Chew has entered the stage?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- exabrial 3y agolol right like I’m signing up for another Zuck platform. I unfortunately am stuck with the ones I have because of their ubiquity. I would jump ship in a heartbeat if a viable alternative actually took off.
- proxy9 3y agoWhat I dislike about Twitter lately: - overarching political propaganda - crypto bros - AI bros - profit chads - constant fighting over idiotic topics, some driven by Musk itself What I care for when I open Twitter: - news - hearing from other people from the dev community If Threads can deliver this, I will be hooked
- m3kw9 3y agoWhich means a lot will be censored, if they don’t censor you end up with the same convo people want to talk about in the current times
- hklgny 3y agoRemember when we used to call that filtering and it was a feature and not a con? Not for actual censuring in cases where it’s demonstrably harmful - but I’m not required to give attention to someone’s opinion just cause they feel like blasting it into the void. Twitters gone too far the other way.
- proxy9 3y agoIf we look at the current situation on Twitter, a lot of content that gets pushed by the algo is dumpster fire. Not sure how that benefits society
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- giarc 3y agoThreads need to realize the importance of the blue check and implement it. Prior to Musk, I would see a tweet, open the replies and look for the blue checks to see what "prominent" people were responding. Now that the blue check means nothing, that's impossible and you have to weed through all the content. You can argue that's a good thing, that a person with 10 followers might be as interesting as someone with 100,000 followers, but it's not for me.
- 3y ago
- thdespou 3y agoI'm signing up. Twitter is a troll farm. Sick and tired of its mess.
- Thalarg 3y agoConsidering the awful state of instagram I have zero hope and try to avoid it at all costs. They have the tech but not the ethics.
- 1970-01-01 3y ago>Share ideas & trends with text The circle of Web 2.X (3.X?) progress continues! This was called the 'Facebook Wall' in 2007. You could write stories, post links, photos, etc. It worked and scaled. Not much longer until they progress into a 'student directory and message' app, exclusively for college and university students. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Facebook_features#Wall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Facebook_features#Wall
- xyst 3y agoBye bye Twitter. Personally I would not use Threads because of association to FB/Meta. But likely many others will. The only real users left on Twitter will be bots and Musk rats
- maverickmax90 3y agoNever seen a more idiotic response lol. Twitter was there during fb highest time ...people have moved away from meta cra* because of values difference. Hope you are from planet earth BTW.
- kbos87 3y agoThere’s a real opportunity here for Meta, but their success is far from a given. To get this right they are going to need to make some product decisions that aren’t in their nature. #1 should be completely, actually bifurcating the experience from their other platforms. If they want me to use my Instagram login and want to make it easy for me to follow my IG followers, fine. But the temptation to “carry” the network or the content over from Instagram or Facebook is going to be strong for them, because it looks like a baked-in advantage their investors will expect them to leverage to its fullest. In reality it’s the total opposite - I’ll be gone instantly if a bunch of low quality content from people I’m not interested in hearing from (read: that girl from high school I might follow on Facebook.)
- docmars 3y agoI think in order for Threads to be successful and compete with Twitter, they will need to stop policing information so heavily as they do on Facebook. Most of my immediate circles left Facebook because of all the tyrannical fact checking notices, suspensions, and "misinfo" policing going on. Whereas Twitter now prides itself in being the free speech absolutist social media app, and information flows freely there. While they do have Community Notes to add context to potential (real) misinformation, at least it's guided by Twitter users and doesn't prevent people from seeing the original post without jumping through hoops, and there's no risk of being suspended for angering the Ministry of Truth, brought to you by government officials looking to cover-up inconvenient facts.
- sequoia 3y agoWill I be able to click on a link to a "threads" post and view it in a browser without logging in?
- kadomony 3y agoMaybe it’s me, but I would have just made this a core expansion of Instagram and had a photo feed and a thread feed that you can easily change between. Pick your default. Seems dumb to have two different apps, both branded “Instagram”.
- hbn 3y agoEh I prefer their approach. Instagram already has too much crap in it, so adding a twitter clone into it would just be one more thing to bulk up Instagram, and from the Threads point of view, I'd like a new Twitter clone to be simple and dedicated, not a feature slapped onto the side of the Instagram app. It seems this thing's only real association to Instagram is that you use your IG account to login, and they already have your social graph to import if you want to.
- manzu 3y agoThe App Privacy Label on this is crazy It says it will collect and link health, fitness, financial, browsing history, usage data, purchases, search history, sensitive information etc Instagram doesn’t track that much, but Facebook does
- Lucent 3y ago"Keep your username" already sold me. Exhausted with every new namespace landrush. Lemon8 made a terrible mistake not piggybacking off TikTok's, alienating everyone who didn't want to battle anew, and no one is happy with Discord's disastrous rollout.
- al_be_back 3y agoa replacement for X, signals a Temp/emergency solution, not a new market, if that's the driver with Threads, they've lost it already. tech-giants are so powerful, they don't have to move-fast-to-break-things, a small tantrum/jitter (e.g Musk-twitter, or rush-to-replace) can mess-up a considerable part of the ecosystem around them; including their own finances. happy to try it, out of curiosity.
- ljlolel 3y agoName overlaps with https://threads.com/ https://threads.com/ ?
- qingcharles 3y agoIt does. Meta product here: https://threads.net/ https://threads.net/
- feldrim 3y agoReminds me of the times when Facebook acquired Friendfeed, a brilliant micro-blogging platform with real-time feed and "like" features before others. Back then, Twitter favs were anonymous while Friendfeed used usernames. It was innovative but it's left abandoned after acquisition until shutting off.
- nsonha 3y agoSome people have an opportunity to undo twitter’s damage to the world and they just build another twitter? Lame.
- charles_f 3y agoThe metaverse revolutionized how we work and live. It completely transformed society as we know it, with the largest adoption of any software product known to humanity. People use it for multiple hours daily, and some even started working in it. Integrated with Facebook's metacurrency based on blockchain, the economy shifted towards decentraland, where the best memes and bored apes are exchanged on the marketplace in Dollzucks. The game changer was the integration with Meta's time machine, which allows me to comment in this thread. They're even talking of adding legs to avatars! It's only logical that meta now sets to take over Twitter, which will happen in a matter of months. Their product is superior and contains very few backdoors on its encryption. All hail Mark! edit: I now realize that the time transportation function might also take you to an alternate time branch, disregard my comment if it's irrelevant
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- qingcharles 3y agoThis page says "Android Coming Soon": https://www.threads.net/download https://www.threads.net/download
- Tiktaalik 3y agoThere's an enormous advantage here in getting people to pivot to this new app in that so many already have an instagram id. If fbook can somehow persuade a few important influencers to switch over on launch day that could get a bunch of instagram using twitter users to download. I'd love to see Blue Sky get traction, but I have to imagine that various government agencies that are looking for a new service to use for their communications are going to be more comfortable pivoting to a Meta product than some new startup.
- fiznool 3y ago243MB for an app that allows you to write text posts and attach media? Shouldn’t this be an order of magnitude smaller?
- freediverx 3y agoTo everyone applauding this as a good development, see you soon on Leopards Ate My Face.
- julienreszka 3y agoI don’t understand. On my iPhone it doesnt open anything
- awill 3y agoWhy have BlueSky taken so long to onboard customers? They had a head start, and they blew it.
- satyajeet23 3y agoWhy is no one talking about this extremely important and absurd condition of the Threads app! "To delete your Threads profile and data, you'll need to delete your instagram account."
- aymar_99 3y agoThis is just an initial version. Their primary focus is to link the Instagram user graph with threads to build a solid use base. The decoupling should emerge in later versions