Threads passes 2 million downloads in 2 hours
It's day one for Threads, Meta's new Twitter clone, and new users are signing up in impressively huge numbers already.
It feels like for every small step taken towards a decentralised social network we get a giant leap back to centralised networks run by surveillance capitalist billionaires
21st century people have only ever known capitalist control, they can't help it
Eh, it also helps that it's from a recognisable brand that people already understand. Decentralised social networks have a long way to go to meet the elevator-pitch test, as it were.
Not to say that it makes it any less bad, but just that it's at the very least understandable - I can easily see the "average person" saying "I want to leave Twitter" and just picking something is relatively similar, with a single logon page that just works out of the gate.
But picking an instance is so hard 😭
This is why we can't have nice things. People literally want to be told what to do.
So much of the systemic problems in the world stem from that sort of mentality
But picking all instance is so hard
I mean actually kinda yes. I'm pretty techy and I spent a few days trying to figure out which one I would use. Ultimately landed on .world because I didn't want to do an interview. Other people might be turned away from that, but maybe it's a good thing.
I've been busy all day, but I've just seen through talking with others how threads is basically blowing up today and lots of our local Twitter accounts, companies, bigger celebrities/influencers and more are going to it and sharing their accounts.
And it just makes me so fucking sad to see people embrace Facebook again when a decentralized, grassroots, non corporate alternative was already right there. It's a lot of "liberal" people, too.
It's sad but understandable. One is the company that people already know and their favorite celebrity just announced their new account, the other is 'wtf is fediverse and federation'?
In all honesty, the lawful evil Zucc is better than the chaotic evil Musk, at least for now.
Zucc is a greedy asshole, but I think he knows when to sit back, and let the smarter people make decisions.
Musk is an arrogant, insufferable fuck. Epitome of a know-it-all.
Which makes him even more dangerous. In my personal world all centralized social networks would be put into Musk’s hand and Zucc behind bars for every genocide, election sway and dictator Facebook has enabled and will enable in the future.
The issue is that Twitter, even with Musk hammering nails into it, is still a better social media than Threads. Threads has no way to even limit your timeline to only people you follow or view posts in reverse chronological order. It's all algorithm and Zuck shoving brands in your face.
Plus Twitter remains one of the last few major havens for NSFW socials, and I doubt Threads will be any more lenient than Instagram's strict rules.
I'm just really hoping that Mastodon gets more traction, but it feels like the realistic version of David vs Goliath where the little guy gets squashed.
At the same time, with Twitter in its current state, it is basically unusable for social media, since your average account is limited to about 300 - 600 requests, which includes every single interaction and loading of all posts you see.
I think it's important to realist that it's not at all about the owner to be evil or benevolent. It is all about what structural and economic incentives exist. A for-profit corporation based on the business model of advertisement is structurally incompatible with some objectives that I - as a netizen - want to achieve (freedom, privacy).
This is also why I don't agree with those of "it's a win for decentralized" or "it will bring users". For me decentralization and other properties (e.g. OpenSource code) are only some necessary conditions to achieve the above abstract and ideological goals.
Pitting two piles of shit against each other does not make the winner any better.
Not better, but if one of them goes down it's still a win in my book.
I don't know. If we're comparing shit, some shit is better than other shit. We don't see farmers fertilizing their fields with duck shit. Nah. They use the good shit - bull shit.
I hope they destroy each other
My worry here is the fact they want to federate with things like Lemmy. We want the users, but we don't want the corporate overlords, and most new users won't know the difference.
The good thing is the corporate overlords have no control over other instances, except to defederate from them
Google basically killed Jabber/XMPP doing exactly what Meta/Facebook is doing here.
It's mostly better than twitter, in that it actually functions reasonably well, and it's obviously considerably worse than Mastodon (especially compared to the Ivory app)
The top 2 are in-line with the behaviour of Instagram's main timeline. So yeah, it's not surprising.
Another downside is your account is linked with your Instagram account.
Their competition is with Twitter. They are not competing with Mastodon (atleast for now).
True, this is just from my own perspective, and I use Mastodon.
Can’t believe you pay a subscription to use a proprietary mastodon app
Are you saying twitter doesn’t function well? In what way? I’m not a massive twitter user but have never had a problem on the iOS app.
The app has become a lot buggier in my experience, but most concerning of all is the ability to read tweets at all is being restricted: https://www.reuters.com/technology/what-does-twitter-rate-limit-exceeded-mean-users-2023-07-03/
It's a bit sad to see the state of things, where the only options the average Joe knows about when wanting to jump ship from Twitter are either a new app by one of the usual megacorporations, a dodgy app built to cater the ultranationalist circles that keep getting banned from everywhere else, or both at the same time.
darnit darnit darnit darnit darnit
As long as I don't have to interact with that instance I'm OK. I'd rather not ever federate with Meta though
Sooo ... we're just gonna take Zuck on his word here ... does anyone know for sure how many people are on there?
I'm wonder if we'll be able to get stats like this ourselves once they are federating with Mastodon instances.
I downloaded it and it instantly wanted my age, so that was a fast delete, didn't even get logged in
Ofcourse it wanted to know your age. You could have just lied if you wanted to just test the app.
my instagram already has my age
It wanted a hell of a lot more than that. Did you see the list of permissions?
Musk is going to be pissed. Let's see if the cage match happens.
Will not happen. Musk doesn't want to get Zucked.
God bless their hearts
![[TECHCRUNCH] Threads passes 2 million downloads in 2 hours](https://lemmy.uhhoh.com/pictrs/image/772de13b-63bb-4efc-b0fd-01c43463a4f0.png?format=webp&thumbnail=196)