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Instagram will shut down its companion app Threads by year end (2021)
- xwdv 3y agoWhat the hell, Threads is launching July 6 isn’t it?
- bdcravens 3y agoNew app, reused name.
- fastball 3y agoWell done on the mildly confusing post. For people that come straight to the comments – Threads was also what Instagram called a standalone messaging app that they introduced in 2019 and never took off. They shut it down at the end of 2021, which is what this article references. Apparently they've re-designed it a bit (or started over from scratch) to turn it into a Twitter competitor now that Twitter is a bit... turbulent, and are relaunching in a few days (which is currently being discussed on HN here[1]). Might've been better to just start with a fresh name rather than resuscitating a brand that has already failed once, but what do I know? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36580192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36580192
- jahnu 3y agoI’d never heard about it before the news that a “new” Threads was coming and I’m reasonably online ;) I’d say the general public don’t know or care about the failed version but will find it easy to try the new one. This is probably the biggest threat to Bluesky gaining tracktion. At least in the medium term. The name is pretty good too. Instantly conveys it’s purpose.
- yawnxyz 3y agoSeems like they keep restarting and testing new things and failing. I was looking into Threads and there's all these variations, and this one's probably going to suffer the same fate. BUT, we shouldn't knock them for trying; that's what startups are all about, right?
- isykt 3y ago> BUT, we shouldn't knock them for trying; that's what startups are all about, right? I am so conflicted about this sentiment. On the one hand, I’m a fan of competition. On another, I dislike the company that is (re-?)entering the market. I guess I just wish an actual start up were coming in, but I guess that era is over. Consolidation has been successful, and now we’re in this weird world where 5-10 giant megacorps run everything we engage with.
- Shawnj2 3y agoThat’s what BlueSky is Also mastodon isn’t exactly a Silicon Valley startup but they have created the only financially sustainable social network which is a feat in its own right
- isykt 3y agoBlueSky isn't launched yet, and Mastodon is horribly confusing. I'm glad they exist, and I hope they fracture the social media space to challenge the monoliths, but I'm not hopeful.
- Shawnj2 3y agoThreads will either fail like every other instagram spin-off or it will do the instagram thing where instagram copies an app and that feature is reasonably popular within Instagram but people still use the full service app version of the feature like how you can use Snapchat and TikTok within Instagram as Instagram stories and reels.
- KSPAtlas 3y agoWhat part of Mastodon is confusing for you?
- isykt 3y agoHow do I know if I want to join an existing instance or create my own? What will I see if I create an account on one instance? How do I discover instances? How does federation work, exactly? Can I federate with an instance because I want to or is there some application process? What happens if I create an account on an instance but I don’t like it?
- totetsu 3y agoHere is an announcement of its relaunch as a messaging app. https://archive.is/jTKuL https://archive.is/jTKuL
- _thisdot 3y agoI’m even more confused now. I’ve used the old Threads until the day it died (quit Instagram after that actually). Wasn’t it always a messaging app?
- Daneel_ 3y agoEverything old is new again.
- kaashif 3y agoAs a non-user of Instagram, I somehow thought Threads was new. I just missed the fact of its existence I guess. It's generally very hard for me to tell whether a social media app is popular, I can't even keep track of which apps exist anymore, apparently.
- rsynnott 3y agoIt is; they’re just reusing a name from an unrelated product.
- ProxCoques 3y agoNow's your chance, Google Plus!
- 29athrowaway 3y agoGoogle Wave https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1qzIEJAFww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1qzIEJAFww
- 12907835202 3y agoI got to be on the early BETA for this as we were doing some stuff for Google. I thought it was the future and registered loads of domains for things I liked suffixed with "wave" thinking it would be possible to create personal or community focused waves in the future. Alas it didn't work out. It's hard to remember how good it was, I remember it being better than Slack, Teams and Discord are now. But maybe that's a false memory.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoTo be honest, it was very hard for most people to understand the concept. They should just have made it public and let people discover it.
- xmcqdpt2 3y agoWave was so cool. I used it to work collaboratively on projects with a friend and it was just great. I was really excited about our wave enabled future. Alas... The simultaneous editing became integrated into Google Docs than in MS Office but I feel like neither really reproduced the magic of Wave. IMO the key ingredient was the chat format: you could go directly from messaging to co-authoring without having to like setup a google doc or send a sharepoint link etc. and then you could keep messaging in the same window. I guess Notion is the modern equivalent? I've gotten burned on hosted notes products too much at this point though.
- 3y ago
- anarchogeek 3y agoThe new Threads app is clearly not an update of their dead photo focused messaging app. I doubt any code was reused at all.
- throwaway290 3y agoThe original Threads was not photo focused. I almost never sent a photo and I was a heavy user. It's primarily for texting people on Instagram without seeing Instagram's algorithmic junk and ads. and that's why it was shut down. It can make no money if it accomplishes its goal perfectly with no obvious way to insert ads.
- jaroniscaring 3y agoThe end of the old Threads was such a blow to me, it was the perfect Digital Minimalism app for using Instagram's DMs to stay in touch with a circle of college friends.
- dmonitor 3y agowas it not just a snapchat clone?
- _thisdot 3y agoLot more limited than Snapchat. You could only text your Close Friends. There wasn’t any concept of “streaks”. You couldn’t follow celebs or news.
- shreyshnaccount 3y agoSame, i almost exclusively used it and deleted instagram
- beirut_bootleg 3y agoI thought this was going to be another instance of that time Bard pre-membered its own demise from lack of adoption.
- michelb 3y agoGreat opportunity for a joke about multi-threading.
- jug 3y agoWeird how it was running on the same network with the same name, but not filling the same purpose. So this is really more just a curiosity. It would have been much stranger if Threads was actually the same thing and now relaunched.
- yawnxyz 3y ago20 years in the future, Instagram Threads, in its 5th iteration, will become Instagram for Knitting, following (and desperately copying) the meteoric rise of decacorn Ravelry