this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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[–] crow@beehaw.org 82 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Since it already worked with instagram, this was people signing in with their instagram account, checking the app once or twice, and then going back to instagram. The starting numbers where incredibly manipulated because of this single account system between threads and instagram.

I saw a lot of people excited to try it. Losing 80% of its peak users at this point doesn't seem like a failure to me. Anybody who was curious was counted as a user. I'm sure fediverse sites have had similar, smaller influxes of new users that create an account to check it out and then don't come back. It takes some determination to move to another social networking ecosystem.

[–] sexy_peach@feddit.de 71 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Good I love to see Facebook projects fail

[–] lorez@lemm.ee 15 points 2 years ago

Fuck the Zuck.

[–] unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.org 60 points 2 years ago

It's a worse Mastodon, run by a company that celebrated election misinformation, leading to the storming of the Capitol, and who later helped police arrest a woman for abortion by turning over private messages she sent to another party. I hope it fails.

[–] CreativeTensors@beehaw.org 43 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I mean if you pay attention most social media inundated with influencers and companies is basically:

"Buy this, no buy this, buy this instead, spend your money here!" It even leeches into everyday conversations outside of social media.

Pay attention to how often people talk about buying things and newly released products. Hell, I've caught myself contributing to it. It's kind of gross when you realize how steeped in consumerism nearly everything has become.

[–] unconsciousvoidling@lemmy.one 1 points 2 years ago

It’s why this place is a boiling trash heap.

[–] NENathaniel@lemmy.ca 36 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Not sure why anyone wanted a second twitter that’s still made by a big-tech

[–] acastcandream@beehaw.org 32 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)
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[–] AnonymousLlama@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago

I'd be keen to give it a go if it were legitimately anyone else besides Facebook. Would have even tried it if Microsoft made a random Twitter clone

[–] jarfil@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago

Well, shareholders, employees and advertisers, wanted it to make money on the users. Even if only 5% users remain, that's still better than the current interest rates after investment fund's fees.

Facebook/Instagram users wanted to check it out, because why not, creating an account was just a couple clicks.

Everyone else... they didn't, and from the looks of it, they still don't.

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[–] virtualfiber@lemmy.ml 23 points 2 years ago (2 children)

damn, reading the data collected from the Play Store made me finally delete my instagram account. the damn app is a free farm of data. fuck zuck

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[–] yoz@aussie.zone 23 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

That's good news. First it was 50% and now 80%. How bout meta loses 100% of its users.

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 17 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I'd still rather see Threads succeed and Twitter die now that a fash-friendly owner lets fashy types run wild.

[–] plantstho@beehaw.org 18 points 2 years ago

Meta plays at least as large a part in radicalizing the boomers towards fascism via Facebook

[–] Scorchio@lemm.ee 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yep, if Threads can accelerate the death of - ugh - X, it will have served its purpose.

[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 19 points 2 years ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Similarweb, a digital intelligence platform, shared its data with Gizmodo showing Threads daily active users hovered around 49 million just two days after launch.

David Carr, a senior insights manager at the analysis company, told us the engagement time based on just U.S. user data was slightly more favorable to Threads, but not by much.

Back during its 15 minutes of fame, Threads was leveraged as the fastest-growing platform in the history of apps, hitting 100 million user signups less than a week after launch.

Instagram head Amad Mosseri has also mentioned their intent to connect Threads to the decentralized Fediverse, though whether that drives new-found interest in the app is anyone’s guess.

It was clear from Thread’s launch that users were desperate for a Twitter alternative away from owner Elon Musk’s unending march toward making the platform a pay-to-play hellscape.

A big problem with the app was that it simply didn’t include features found in its main competitors, and the company spent years playing catch up, but all in vain.


I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] sculd@beehaw.org 17 points 2 years ago

A lot of people tried it out the first few days. Didn't found the function they need and left.

Probably a lot will go back if its fully functional. Honestly cannot believe a Twitter alternative did not launch with chronological feed....

[–] Fester@lemm.ee 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I like how they made the logo look like it says “ADS” throughout.

[–] shiveyarbles@beehaw.org 9 points 2 years ago
[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 2 points 2 years ago

You forgot the I.

[–] jcrabapple@dmv.pub 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

This is what happens when you launch with no content discovery features, so you have to whore yourself out and follow anyone and everyone if you want to get any attention. "Content creators" and clout chasers are the primary customer of this service, so without that I don't know why they'd want to use it.

[–] Nyla_Smokeyface@beehaw.org 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Threads had no discovery features?! Jesus Christ...

[–] jcrabapple@dmv.pub 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

No hashtags, no full text search. Just an algorithmic feed and a following feed, and you can only search users.

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[–] Ertebolle@kbin.social 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

It's just companies and influencers, nobody else is posting much there. And half of the influencers are only there to try to get you to follow them somewhere else. (feed is absolutely crammed with Taylor "not wearing a mask outdoors in 2023 is literally genocide" Lorenz hawking her new YouTube channel and I don't even follow her)

Meanwhile Mastodon continues growing steadily, and I'm getting as much engagement there as I ever did on Twitter with maybe 10% as many followers.

[–] BiggestBulb@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

My one big gripe with Mastadon is that images take absolutely forever to load if they have even a marginal amount of pixels. I scroll art often and I'm left waiting for greater than a minute for these things to load (and I'm on a very, very fast connection).

Talk to your instance admin for that. Mastodon caches remote images and serves it from the local server to local users, so it should be fast unless the admin has something broken or configured wrong.

[–] Roundcat@kbin.social 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Turns out, the brands and the ads weren't the reason people were sticking to Twitter.

You mean people aren't hopping on the join the conversation with Crisco and General Mills? Who woulda thunk! I thought for sure that would be the killer application right there.

[–] altima_neo@lemmy.zip 12 points 2 years ago

Ive been hearing the same headline for two weeks now

[–] uplusion23@lemm.ee 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Honestly not that big of a deal. When something is hyped up users who either didn't or barely used Twitter (X) probably joined in. It boosted their initial numbers but again they fell off. They'll grow as unique content grows. That happens with everything, as will the case be with Lemmy. Growth isn't linear.

[–] whelmer@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago

I suppose it isn't linear but I suspect going from massive insane explosion in numbers to an 80% loss in a matter of weeks is pretty unusual. I think that growth was largely driven not by hype but by the automatic linking with other Zuckernedia properties.

[–] sanbeiji@programming.dev 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This looks like a hype cycle pattern, and they are entering the trough of disillusionment phase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

[–] Quexotic@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago

Could be the trough of dissolutionment or the trough of oblivion from which there is no return. Probably too early to tell.

[–] SolNine@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 years ago

And here I am... I've never even tried it.

[–] Arkham@beehaw.org 7 points 2 years ago

Sounds like Threads has lost the thread...

I'll see myself out.

[–] sunflower_scribe@beehaw.org 6 points 2 years ago

I think there will be more activity once they add more features. It’s very bare-bones right now. I honestly like the app, though, all things considered. I hate Facebook/Meta, but it’s been a nice app to just scroll through, and there’s been enough content to use it as a time killer. They desperately need a proper search feature and a trending page, though, especially if they ever hope to fully replace Twitter. Overall, I like it more than both Mastodon and Bluesky, because discoverability is so awful on Mastodon and Bluesky doesn’t have enough users and content because they haven’t gone public yet. And I very much like the idea and structure of Mastodon much more (with it being open source and federated), but the user experience has been so bad for me, with discoverability being the worst aspect of it.

[–] FoxBJK@midwest.social 6 points 2 years ago

10 million DAU's is still pretty impressive

[–] Drinvictus@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They should have implemented activity pub support from day 1. They rushed the roll out because they wanted to make us of Twitter's (one of many) fuck ups but failed to keep users.

[–] Roundcat@kbin.social 13 points 2 years ago

They probably should have, but I'm glad they didn't.

[–] lloram239@feddit.de 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

They could have picked a better name. Took me a while to figure out that https://threads.com/ isn't the right app. Visiting https://www.threads.net/ wasn't exactly enlightening either.

[–] StarLuigi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 years ago

Also the fact they don't have a web app is infuriating

[–] 2ndtryagain@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago

https://www.threads.net/have a proper Desktop Client a lot of people aren't going to be very active on it, they say it is coming but they also say ActivityPub is coming.

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[–] terminhell@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 years ago

Good. I've managed to block tiktok and all meta services from my network.

[–] fulminaire@lemm.ee 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Because it's so boring. It doesn't have a "trending" tab and every post is an ad.

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 3 points 2 years ago

I just created the summary! You can find it at https://lemmings.world/comment/922676.

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