2y ago

Twitter traffic is 'tanking' as Meta's Threads hits 100 million users

www.cnbc.com

Meta's new text-based social app Threads has quickly gained 100 million users since launching last week, which appears to be negatively impacting traffic on Twitter. According to web analytics, Twitter traffic declined 5-11% over the first two days Threads was available compared to the previous week. Threads was able to grow rapidly by allowing users to sign up with their existing Instagram accounts and bring over some of their followers. However, Threads has not yet launched in Europe due to regulatory issues. The fast growth of Threads may solidify its position as a real competitor to Twitter, which has over 238 million daily active users.

82 comments

Cool, fleeing one megacorp run by a huge tool for another megacorp run by a huge tool
- Haha, you nailed it.
- At least the promise with Threads is that you can move your account and who you follow to a different Mastodon instance in the future.
  
  And as we all know, big corporations always keep their promises.
  
  I got a fiver that they'll implement "ActivityPub" in a way that breaks things.
  
  I know they said they'll federate with ActivityPub, but did they say they will allow you to move accounts to other instances? That seems extremely unlikely to happen
This is a moment when I'd love to use the "you love to see it" meme comment, but it's more like... "People are fleeing the burning building, and running across the street to an identical building that is infested with rats and cockroaches!"
- "Out of the frying pan, into the fire"
- Maybe an optimistic take: people moving = people realising they can move. Eventually some of them may also realise they can move to a platform that’s not controlled by a shitty corpo.
  
  And can instead move to a platform that is controlled by a rando instance owner with their own set of quirks and foibles. And can choose amongst thousands of such instances, each controlled by a different rando with a different set of quirks and foibles. Out of the frying pan and into the fire indeed.
  
  That's a good point. Plus they won't be as embedded in the new place as they won't have 10+ years of history on it. So moving becomes easier generally
- "...and running across the street to an identical building that is infested with rats and cockroaches!"
  Still better than Nazis.
  
  Meta has contributed to genocide, which is worse than I can (currently) say about musk
  
  LibsofTiktok is approved there, so I'm not so sure. Not overwhelmingly Nazi, but Nazis are welcome as long as they don't say slurs kind of thing that centrists like.
  
  Threads has those too.
  
  Yeah, about that …
- While ranking the misdeeds of billionaires is a tricky business, given the choice I'd say Zuck is slightly better than Musk at the moment. :)
  
  No need to limit yourself to those two awful options when good alternatives exist which aren't run by either of them.
  
  The guy that sold Bannon the user data he wanted under the table?
  
  Could I play it safe and fire them both into the sun?
  
  Hard disagree there. Facebook contributed to literal genocide. Elon is just an asshole.
- Probably better to use "out of the frying pan and into the fire"
Don't think that meta turning into even more of a global social megacorp that controls everything a lot of people seee and interact with day to day is a good thing tbh.
- Most people happily exchange one master for another without thinking much about it
  
  To be fair, the change isn’t really affecting them, so why should they care. As long as they still have their favourite celebs it doesn’t really matter to them who owns the platform
  
  It's the time between masters that is interesting and unpredictable and just fun
- Yeah - stuff like this should REALLY be public infrastructure
  I know a lot of people are opposed to the state running things but I really wouldn't mind if there was a well-managed state-run federated instance for all of this
  at least with Matrix Europe is already doing something like this since it's the de-facto-standard for a lot of the internal chats - but there really needs to be a push to make it more popular.
  Having the kind of "lock-in" that Meta has where their userbase alone is an argument of using their service is horrible since it makes every competition futile...
  
  From the perspective of someone in the UK, the ongoing shift in government and society towards openly discriminatory/suppressive policies aimed at some minorities (trans people, certain ethnic/cultural groups) and the accompanying moral panics to that effect make the idea of the state running, monitoring and controlling social media as a utility a bit terrifying - particularly for something so fundamental to modern life.
  A lot of the issues with centralised social media in private hands would just be intensified if the state were directly running the show - it can’t be trusted to act as a benign, responsible steward.
  
  Today I saw that my countries government has started a mastadon instance, which is pretty neat. Previously they've used twitter for some communication but they got some flack for that recently.
Threads has not yet launched in Europe due to regulatory issues
LOL no, there are no "regulatory issues". Meta itself expects Threads to be illegal in the EU. Which is probably correct. And they do not seem to be having a problem with it. Which is fine by me.
- Threads has not launched in Europe because it breaks European laws. Yet 100M people jumped straight on it.
  
  From my understanding, people haven't "jumped on it", they were effectively pushed from existing Meta accounts.
I am willing to be corrected, but from what I understand from my online friend (who is Indian (living in the region) and reports on tech with a focus on India, Asia and Southeast Asia), a lot of Threads’ early adoption is entrenchment. For instance, most of India’s IG users migrated to Threads, and that was part of the initial 10 million.
I just don’t think that we can look at Threads’ adoption rates in the same way as, say, we look at Mastodon or even early Twitter. Threads is built upon an existing base: Instagram. Meta even pre-made your Threads account if you have IG. I mean, technically I have a Threads account, sitting there, in the shadows. I also have an Excite account. And I dug up my MySpace account in a fit of pique (and then remembered why I left MySpace all those years ago). But having something and using something are different.
That not to say that Threads isn’t going to end up as Meta’s “revenge” just that the adoption is not necessarily because Threads is better, but that the entire social media monetization culture is pre-built through Instagram; and there not only is no barrier to entry, but you can stumble into the Threads “garden” with ease. It’s basically the same model Microsoft used to bootstrap Windows using the pre-installed DOS base. And it will succeed because the outreach mechanisms are already in place.
That doesn’t change my mind about choosing Mastodon. I have different online handles for different needs. I lost my original IG handle many years ago, so made one using my real name to lurk on IG; so my Threads handle will end up being my real name, and that’s a show stopper for using the platform. My real name social media are “honey pots” to keep nosey companies out of my hair and ways to keep an eye on my squirrelly remnants of a family. I have no desire to post anything on my real name Threads identity.
- This is why killing it by defederating was never going to happen. We can only protect ourselves.
https://9to5google.com/2023/07/10/threads-readies-handy-explainer-of-mastodon-and-the-fediverse/
When you limit replies, your thread will not be shared with your fediverse followers.
Private profiles will be able to follow an interact with people on other platforms at a later date.
Like clockwork
- How is this controversial? If someone locked down replied / set profile as private they have clearly communicated their intent to limit exposure of their posts. It only makes sense to limit such users from interacting with other servers which Meta has no control over. There are lots of compliance issues for a company like Meta when they have to operate in multiple jurisdictions.
- Your first point is an "initial limitation".
  Your second point:" This is presumably due to most fediverse services not yet supporting reply restrictions."
  Not sure why you are using select quotes without giving the full context to make a point that is actually not there.
- what is this private vs public profile? I don't know the difference.
@trashhalo Nice, they can remove their API limit again? hahahha. Just kidding, Twitter is ded anyway.
I tried out Threads just to see what the fuss was about. It's mostly just annoying celebrities.
- It exists to provide the illusion of competition.
https://mastodon.social/@taylorlorenz/110693385561252959 Elon really made some metric up to claim twitter is healthy
- Wouldn't cumulative user-seconds of screen time per day be plummeting if you can only see 500 tweets per day or whatever that limit was that he rolled out? I'd be doubting any company's claims of record high viewership at a time when most of their users were reportedly being locked out of the site due to a new policy, even if their metric didn't have such an oddly specific name.
Maybe those are mostly Instagram accounts?
- @kelvinjps
  @trashhalo Yes, it is. Each Insta account automatically now seems to have a Meta account. And visa versa, it's a scam. You can't delete your Meta's Threads account, unless you delete your Instagram.
  
  This is not true. Each Instagram account has the ability to log into Threads. But it's opt-in. If you don't want to use Threads then don't sign up for it. Meta is not duplicating Instagram accounts automatically into Threads.
  And yes, you can't delete your Threads account since it is your Instagram account. Threads is more a feature flag that they turn on/off on your IG account. I agree that they should make it possible to turn that feature off in the future.
Is this considered masochism? This seems like masochism.
Now if only my feed can only show the accounts I'm actually following
- What’s profitable about that? Just a thing that’s useful and relevant to your interests?
Linking these to instagram accounts is textbook anti-trust behavior to establish market positions
Not a goddamn thing about this is 'organic'
- I don't see the problem with it, it just sounds like the logical thing to do. You can log into any Google service with a Google account, so log into an Instagram service with an Instagram account too. You can also already log into Instagram with a Facebook account, so this isn't even unprecedented within Meta.
  
  I don't think anybody's saying there's anything wrong with using Instagram accounts as the base to access the platform. It'll become federated soon, so that won't be a requirement for long.
  The issue that some people take, myself included, is that those aren't really "new" users, so calling it "growth" is disingenuous. They're already Instagram users. It effectively makes Threads just Instagram+. Not that that's inherently a bad thing, but it's not really "organic growth" as Zuck is calling it. There's nothing to "grow" if the user base already existed in the first place; it's just the same user base having access to a new feature.

82 comments