No Thanks—Why I'm Avoiding Instagram Threads.

ekZepp@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 374 points –
49

I'm mainly avoiding it because it's dumb

That. I never understood the usefullness of twitter anyway so i won't find Threads usefull either

It's because you don't idolize celebrities and other famous figures enough to know what they do daily.

There were a lot more people on Twitter than pop culture celebrities.

In pretty much any field you can think of, some of its leading figures would be on there. Economics, urbanism, tech, astronomy, game developers, journalists, fan communities of essentially any creative work, communities for marginalized identities, pretty much any interest was well-represented there.

Garbage in, garbage out. I use(d) Twitter to follow a bunch of high profile Machine Learning and Software Engineering professionals, and my (non algorithmic) feed was rather useful and informative.

Yeah, I feel tabloid stuff gets pushed to me from everywhere, why should I go looking for more of that.

It was great for artists and scientists. My twitter feed was mainly filled with paleoartists and paleontologists bickering about the fullness of t rex lips and I sorely miss it.

I'm using Mastodon these days, and while not everyone from Twitter is there, bird.makeup fills the gap enough that it gives me a pretty similar experience.

Did we really need a YouTube video to explain why one shouldn't use meta products?

I really don't get this trend of turning everything into a video. Is it supposed to be easier to consume?

I would much rather read an article and get the information I want at the pace I want.

My workplace has taught me that the majority of adults cannot read above a fifth grade level.

Yep. If it's a video it gets a hard pass from me. They can get their 'views' from someone else.

Just be thankful it’s an 8 minute video and not a 2 minute tic tok full of weird facial expressions.

videos are easier to consume while doing something else. reading may be faster, but you can't drive to work, do the dishes, workout, etc. while reading. if you're not into multitasking then reading is the clearly better option, but I think most young people have grown up so surrounded by barrages of inormation from different sources all at once that multitasking comes extremely naturally to them

I have to say I also watch videos in background while doing other stuff, but that doesn't make it a better medium to convey information, just more practical when the information is not important enough to be the main focus of someone's attention, and that's pretty subjective.

But I do get the point, I just wish it was different.

glad to know that I'm not alone who prefers to read articles over watching videos

I'm avoiding it because I have Meta's entire network blocked at my router. 😄

Because Reddit in my opinion was the least worst social network until a month ago, now that I’m gone I’m not going to go signing up for another Zuckerberg/musk/spez monstrosity. I go on TikTok because I have a teenage daughter and we need something to talk about. Other than that…no. Federation/non-profit or nothing.

I mean, the fact that it's made by Meta should be a good enough reason. I'm avoiding Meta like the plague. Fucking sucks that I need Facebook Messenger for school group chats though.

Yea, that's the problem, I want to de-meta as much as I can, but real-life their network effect is so large you can't not use them on some level. While I've not been using Facebook for years, I still have to use WhatsApp. xD

I tried to use Threads but I couldn't change my visible username without going to Instagram, which I never used in my life ..... and then I went to instagram to update my Threads profile but I couldn't because I needed a Facebook account, which I don't have. I found this incredibly frustrating and dumb so I uninstalled everything.

Twitter was always trash. Why would I want to use a halfassed knockoff version from an exponentially worse company?

Elron somehow made Twitter so bad that fake Zuckbook Twitter looks good by comparison.

I’m avoiding because is Meta, deleted FB and Instagram in 2015 and WhatsApp when they merged the accounts! Already blocked Threads domain on my Pi-hole!

Same here! I dodged FB when they listed on the stock exchange.

Honestly! I don’t think a lot of people care about privacy.

Honestly if you're using Lemmy all this information is already publicly accessible, any public forum isnt privacy friendly

Sure, the information we post here is public, but you can remain anonymous if you want.

I’m not talking about the public stuff, because that’s not where the money is for Meta. Here is the stuff the Thread app collects

Now juxtapose that with what the Lemmy app collects.

Oh, it’s worse than that even. Tap on that block and see the whole list. There are like ~170 separate data points listed, it’s insane. They’re saving everything!

Sorry misunderstood your comment, yeah Threads/Meta is god awful for collecting data wouldn't want to touch them personally

There definitely is money in it for Meta though, just yesterday there was quite a popular post showing the types of data that is available to both users and instance owners. If one wanted to they could use things such as your upvotes and down votes to build a sort of profile about you, your political affiliations, interests etc

Meta isn't just a problem, ad companies can easily set up an instance to start collecting data from other servers

What's surprising to me is that the android version of threads has no such requirements. It asks for contacts, camera, location, photos, notification, and mic permissions, and you don't need to enable them to use the app

I'm avoiding it because:

  1. I live in the European Union. Yay!

  2. Either I have gazillions of followers, or I'm a mere leprous peasant not worthy to interact with.

Imagine using a product by Facebook. The same company which sold millions of its user data to ad company without their user knowledge. 🤡

Meh, seriously contemplating deleting my Facebook, mostly for oooold friends. I enjoy Instagram. Fuck Threads. WhatsApp is the shit. And I'm in the EU.