Other than giving himself away as a hyperbolic partisan ass, the rest of the article was really funny. I said something similar about the metaverse: it's not really possible to build a community at scale out of nothing like this. Organic growth is what makes something authentic, if you just plop down a multi-million user new community, it gets all of the problems or a big platform without any of the entrenched good stuff that made it popular. It will be interesting to see if it's possible to convert, I doubt it because it will require a patience and stubbornness that Meta has never shown.

I'm not optimistic about the Threads product, but I think its failure will be a positive overall impact on public discourse.

Facebook isn't our friend. Zuck doesn't want a "more friendly place" he wants censorship and monetization.

If you can start with the premise that the primary paying audience for both Twitter and Instagram are advertisers then the value Threads provides to Meta is to provide an additional feature bundle to those advertisers. Basically:

"Hey look Mr. Brand Advertiser, included in your $999 a month Instagram ad subscription, you now get access to Threads (our Twitter clone) with 1K Thread ad impressions bundled in for free - for a limited time only."

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

The fact that the advertised Fediverse integration doesn't even exist in the current version is very funny to me as well.

I feel like it will find its niche with people who feel comfortable on Instagram, but it certainly doesn't come close to replacing Twitter for me.

And of course that the thread got flagged, for whatever reason.

I don't think Threads will have the same fate as other Facebook/Meta products simply because the sign up process is so painless. If you use Instagram (which like 1bn+ people do) then signing up just means downloading the app and pressing a couple of buttons. So barrier of entry is extremely low and Instagram is still popular with young people.

Facebook was forgotten by young people already in 2012, so Facebook Poke was not really going to compete. I don't think you can draw parallels there.

I'm excited to see if they can innovate in the space. I don't really see Zuckerberg as a bad figure.

Maybe when Meta is done paying people off to post fake things the real culture will make it through.

Threads, as an MVP, does not yet have the ability to see only content from those you follow. That hardly means it won't. Already, activity from those you follow shows up first in your feed, so TBH it's a pretty good experience until you run out of followees' content. It's extremely premature to write it off.

What's wrong with $19 turkey sandwich, is delicatessen 25€ turkey sandwich better?

So I'd personally want Threads to succeed. Everything about Twitter is broken especially in the recent months. I'm not saying Threads is good, but Threads at least has a chance not to be as bad as Twitter. Also fediverse support in the future is a huge plus.

Can everyone agree to refer to Zuck like this from now on?

All that melodrama, complaining and whining in the blog post and then ends up using Threads.

Quite amusing to read.

Into the garbage bin it goes.

I'm also seeing a lot of toots from users lobbying their instances to do the same. Including the instance I chose.

Personally I want to see Threads' content and I'd prefer to do so from within Mastodon. But if Mastodon wants to be a nice cozy closed echo chamber instead of federating with those (soon to be) 500M new users that's also fine. It's just not what I was promised/thought I was signing up for, so I'll leave (I won't self host).

it's possible that it just doesn't matter at all, and in fact the centralization is a selling point for pretty much everyone who isn't a nerd about federation.

we'll see.