(Photo: what the dumb little app looks like on my iPad)
So…I’ve honestly been worried that threads is going to be successful and take away potential new users who might otherwise find their way to Lemmy/mastodon. Isn’t that why Zuck is doing this after all? To get their users hooked on their federated client and then steal their data and sell them ads?
I figured I’d give in and sign up today, make a little bit of trouble (talk down meta, talk up fediverse) and then 1 star the app and delete it. Sign up was easy and I see that I have around 30 follow requests from my Instagram friends. A lot of them have been posting……it looks like. Crap, I think. Meta might get away with this.
Well, there is no iPad app which is ridiculous…even TikTok has one. The iPhone app is ugly and basic. Looking closely at my friends accounts, it seems clear that most of them tried it, made a few posts (a week ago or more) or zero posts in some cases…and that’s it. The “feed” has one option and it serves you whatever the hell it wants…for me it was nothing but splashy bullshit from Entertainment Weekly, political pundits, lame memes and The Tonight Show. Completely devoid of anything meaningful or interesting at all. I had followed back 30 people and there were zero posts in my feed from any of them.
I’m so happy! It’s complete trash. I hope Zuckerberg is thoroughly embarrassed and the whole thing fails. 🎉Goodnight 😄
Really goes to show it’s been rushed out to hell to compete with a dying Twitter before competitors like BlueSky can come in and pick up the users. Throw in some Mastodon compatibility as well to make sure to EEE it.
It’s probably been in development less than a month.
I guess we should just be thankful it was rushed and everyone who signed in saw that it was soulless bullshit and it’ll die…
I really hope we can get people to start being skeptical about getting sucked in by these “new” social media platforms when they are bankrolled by megacorporations. It’s going to end badly…even if you like it today they are going to fuck us.
Definitely agree. Like centralized BBSes back in the days, social media was a novel idea and it led to some platforms to become overly dominant as they were the first and only ones in the market. Then there’s been enough clones and the userbase fragmented enough that ultimately a standard protocol and interoperability just becomes necessary.
Same with Reddit, as users flee to a whole bunch of platforms, it becomes evident that in the end, there’s going to be more and more demand for interoperability as nobody wants to sign up for 10 different places with the inevitable overlapping content.
Zuckerberg made a diarrhea sandwich, and musk is only mad about it because he didn’t get to add extra dookie sauce.
The fact that you can’t control your feed hardly at all is the part that drives me away from Threads the most. The thing I loved about these social media sites back when they first launched (Facebook, Twitter, etc) was that the feeds were all sequential. That meant it was actually possible to keep up with everything posted by my friends, and there was an obvious stopping point. The day Facebook moved to pushing a non-sequential stream of content in your face was the day I realized these websites did not care about my experience at all. Now those websites serve you at least 75% garbage that isn’t even posted by any of your friends, and the only reason anyone uses it is because they feel obligated to use a site their friends supposedly also use.
Federated social media instances just makes so much more sense. The users having control over the platform they use is the way this ought to be. There is absolutely no reason a huge corporation should be controlling our social networks for us.
YES your comment really brings me back and hits the nail on the head. I remember in the mid 2000’s when we all moved from MySpace to Facebook it was pretty empty…there were several years where you could literally “catch up” on Facebook, having literally seen every single new post since the last time you logged on.
It’s been humorous watching Facebook try to replace or compete with tumblr/blogspot, Craigslist, photo hosting sites, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok…the whole FarmVille era with shitty games. Location checkins. I don’t understand why they aren’t just content to be the biggest website in the world, sell ads and sell your data and get paid. Allowing you to have a feed where you ONLY see friends and pages you follow wouldn’t prevent that. But they need to be the curator of what you see…I guess.
The part that is bizarre with threads is that people WANT a twitter replacement…so why doesn’t Facebook just made a really good one, get everyone hooked and THEN enshittify everything with the curated feed, algorithms, manipulation. They could even pull in mastodon users by having a good app and federation (if some people are dumb enough to get hoodwinked). I think they’ve already lost that chance because people have logged in and seen that it’s clearly a trap to feed you ads with an ILLUSION of being able to follow friends and celebrities or whatever.
I’m glad that they didn’t make threads worth a damn because if they had it might have worked…
But what do I know. I’m not an evil genius like zuck, Elmo, Bozos etc
