Twitter traffic is 'tanking' as Meta's Threads hits 100 million users

trashhalo@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 222 points – Twitter traffic is 'tanking' as Meta's Threads hits 100 million users
cnbc.com

Meta's new text-based social app Threads has quickly gained 100 million users since launching last week, which appears to be negatively impacting traffic on Twitter. According to web analytics, Twitter traffic declined 5-11% over the first two days Threads was available compared to the previous week. Threads was able to grow rapidly by allowing users to sign up with their existing Instagram accounts and bring over some of their followers. However, Threads has not yet launched in Europe due to regulatory issues. The fast growth of Threads may solidify its position as a real competitor to Twitter, which has over 238 million daily active users.

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This is a moment when I'd love to use the "you love to see it" meme comment, but it's more like... "People are fleeing the burning building, and running across the street to an identical building that is infested with rats and cockroaches!"

Maybe an optimistic take: people moving = people realising they can move. Eventually some of them may also realise they can move to a platform that’s not controlled by a shitty corpo.

And can instead move to a platform that is controlled by a rando instance owner with their own set of quirks and foibles. And can choose amongst thousands of such instances, each controlled by a different rando with a different set of quirks and foibles. Out of the frying pan and into the fire indeed.

It's more like realizing that you're surrounded by fire, so you might as well pick a patch with a nice view.

And can choose amongst thousands of such instances

Kinda glossing over that point.

That's a good point. Plus they won't be as embedded in the new place as they won't have 10+ years of history on it. So moving becomes easier generally

"...and running across the street to an identical building that is infested with rats and cockroaches!"

Still better than Nazis.

Meta has contributed to genocide, which is worse than I can (currently) say about musk

It's amazing how people forget these things.

LibsofTiktok is approved there, so I'm not so sure. Not overwhelmingly Nazi, but Nazis are welcome as long as they don't say slurs kind of thing that centrists like.

They may not say the slur, but they encode it.

Exactly, because that's the line for centrists. Bigoted and hateful statements are perfectly acceptable in cynical corporate "neutral" spaces if they're framed "politely." As long as the bad words aren't used, they're permitted. Libsoftiktok wants nothing less than the total elimination of certain populations of people and there's no way in reality that that should be an acceptable topic of political discussion regardless of word choice.

The Nazis set the fire, and now they're fleeing along with everyone else.

And hey, I'd rather have them on Threads than in here with us.

While ranking the misdeeds of billionaires is a tricky business, given the choice I'd say Zuck is slightly better than Musk at the moment. :)

No need to limit yourself to those two awful options when good alternatives exist which aren't run by either of them.

Hard disagree there. Facebook contributed to literal genocide. Elon is just an asshole.

Yeah well. Children are dying every day in cobalt mines because we need minerals for EV batteries

Yes, but unlike Elon's claim, he did not actually invent the electric car. He wasn't even the founder of Tesla. It was going to happen with or without him.

Could I play it safe and fire them both into the sun?

The guy that sold Bannon the user data he wanted under the table?

Cool, fleeing one megacorp run by a huge tool for another megacorp run by a huge tool

At least the promise with Threads is that you can move your account and who you follow to a different Mastodon instance in the future.

And as we all know, big corporations always keep their promises.

Yeah, I bought a bridge on pre-order 🙂

Pffft, bridge! Just you wait till that guy I met at the pub delivers the friggin' EIFFEL TOWER to my house in s months time! Only cost me a pint! 😁👌🗼

I’m all for shitting on big corporations but the fact that they wanted to create a platform based on activitypub is interesting.

Adam Mosseri seems to have good intentions with Threads (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hard-fork/id1528594034?i=1000619512224). But Zuck/Meta is most likely going to derail that at some point.

I honestly don’t care for Threads in the long run. My only hope is to follow some people on Threads from a different Mastodon instance. Whatever else they want to do, I don’t care about.

People should be skeptical but competition to Twitter is good. And even better if that product is built on the Fediverse.

I got a fiver that they'll implement "ActivityPub" in a way that breaks things.

I think initially there will be some limitations. And there are definitely flaws and limitations with activitypub. Maybe this will push the protocol forward to be better.

But if they really break it, why not fork it and not worry about Threads?

I think it’s funny that people think that Meta will kill the Fediverse. Just like Google “killed” xmpp. I think neither is true.

Sure, if Meta isn't going to act actively malicious, and they will. That is their standard operating procedure. How anyone can look at how Facebook has operated and say, "Ah yes, they'll be a good neighbor," is beyond me. We should be walling them off and let them be a cancer onto themselves, rather than let them in the ecosystem and then turn malignant.

Threads != Facebook

If you don’t want to follow people that are on threads more power to you. That’s the beauty of activitypub.

I know they said they'll federate with ActivityPub, but did they say they will allow you to move accounts to other instances? That seems extremely unlikely to happen

Adam Mosseri (the actual person behind Threads) in the podcast that I linked in a different comment said that’s one of the goals of Threads.

I doubt it’s going to happen in the next week or two but it seems like they are embracing activitypub.

It’s a pretty solid interview. It’s a podcast called hard fork.

Of course Adam knows how to PR and take some of the things he says with a grain of salt but he seems pretty candid.

Don't think that meta turning into even more of a global social megacorp that controls everything a lot of people seee and interact with day to day is a good thing tbh.

Most people happily exchange one master for another without thinking much about it

To be fair, the change isn’t really affecting them, so why should they care. As long as they still have their favourite celebs it doesn’t really matter to them who owns the platform

It's the time between masters that is interesting and unpredictable and just fun

Yeah - stuff like this should REALLY be public infrastructure

I know a lot of people are opposed to the state running things but I really wouldn't mind if there was a well-managed state-run federated instance for all of this

at least with Matrix Europe is already doing something like this since it's the de-facto-standard for a lot of the internal chats - but there really needs to be a push to make it more popular.

Having the kind of "lock-in" that Meta has where their userbase alone is an argument of using their service is horrible since it makes every competition futile...

From the perspective of someone in the UK, the ongoing shift in government and society towards openly discriminatory/suppressive policies aimed at some minorities (trans people, certain ethnic/cultural groups) and the accompanying moral panics to that effect make the idea of the state running, monitoring and controlling social media as a utility a bit terrifying - particularly for something so fundamental to modern life.

A lot of the issues with centralised social media in private hands would just be intensified if the state were directly running the show - it can’t be trusted to act as a benign, responsible steward.

No reason the state can't run their own Mastodon instance. Then they don't have to moderate anything except the comment sections on their own pages, but everyone can consume the content as they please.

I live in a region of the US recently effected by a freak natural disaster. The US Army Core of Engineers announced at 2AM last night that they might have to release water from a dam, adding to the floodwaters in an already flooded downtown near me. On Twitter. Which you can't view unless you create an account, and even then you might get rate limited. That's not an acceptable availability for a public emergency announcement.

Yes, having state-run instances of federated social media would be an excellent way to both legitimize the fediverse and remove some of the control that these mega-corporations have. There's no reason why privately- or corporate-run instances could not exist alongside these instances, and would still serve to combat potential state or corporate censorship.

The logic of what you're saying is that the executive teams Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg would provide better leadership for the UK than the current people.

I mean it's a low bar, but I wouldn't go that far.

I’d say that, honestly. Comfortably so, even - if the large private providers are acting badly, at least there’s the potential of smaller private groups setting up their own.

Services directly managed by the state tend to require adherence to a government’s political preferences - where something like the idea of social media as a state-owned utility is concerned, the reality of that would inevitably trend in unfortunate directions for minorities that the government has decided to consider a problem.

It really sucks that this is a legit concern in the UK these days, I'm sorry.

Today I saw that my countries government has started a mastadon instance, which is pretty neat. Previously they've used twitter for some communication but they got some flack for that recently.

Threads has not yet launched in Europe due to regulatory issues

LOL no, there are no "regulatory issues". Meta itself expects Threads to be illegal in the EU. Which is probably correct. And they do not seem to be having a problem with it. Which is fine by me.

Threads has not launched in Europe because it breaks European laws. Yet 100M people jumped straight on it.

From my understanding, people haven't "jumped on it", they were effectively pushed from existing Meta accounts.

I am willing to be corrected, but from what I understand from my online friend (who is Indian (living in the region) and reports on tech with a focus on India, Asia and Southeast Asia), a lot of Threads’ early adoption is entrenchment. For instance, most of India’s IG users migrated to Threads, and that was part of the initial 10 million.

I just don’t think that we can look at Threads’ adoption rates in the same way as, say, we look at Mastodon or even early Twitter. Threads is built upon an existing base: Instagram. Meta even pre-made your Threads account if you have IG. I mean, technically I have a Threads account, sitting there, in the shadows. I also have an Excite account. And I dug up my MySpace account in a fit of pique (and then remembered why I left MySpace all those years ago). But having something and using something are different.

That not to say that Threads isn’t going to end up as Meta’s “revenge” just that the adoption is not necessarily because Threads is better, but that the entire social media monetization culture is pre-built through Instagram; and there not only is no barrier to entry, but you can stumble into the Threads “garden” with ease. It’s basically the same model Microsoft used to bootstrap Windows using the pre-installed DOS base. And it will succeed because the outreach mechanisms are already in place.

That doesn’t change my mind about choosing Mastodon. I have different online handles for different needs. I lost my original IG handle many years ago, so made one using my real name to lurk on IG; so my Threads handle will end up being my real name, and that’s a show stopper for using the platform. My real name social media are “honey pots” to keep nosey companies out of my hair and ways to keep an eye on my squirrelly remnants of a family. I have no desire to post anything on my real name Threads identity.

This is why killing it by defederating was never going to happen. We can only protect ourselves.

https://9to5google.com/2023/07/10/threads-readies-handy-explainer-of-mastodon-and-the-fediverse/

When you limit replies, your thread will not be shared with your fediverse followers.

Private profiles will be able to follow an interact with people on other platforms at a later date.

Like clockwork

How is this controversial? If someone locked down replied / set profile as private they have clearly communicated their intent to limit exposure of their posts. It only makes sense to limit such users from interacting with other servers which Meta has no control over. There are lots of compliance issues for a company like Meta when they have to operate in multiple jurisdictions.

Your first point is an "initial limitation".

Your second point:" This is presumably due to most fediverse services not yet supporting reply restrictions."

Not sure why you are using select quotes without giving the full context to make a point that is actually not there.

Maybe those are mostly Instagram accounts?

@kelvinjps
@trashhalo Yes, it is. Each Insta account automatically now seems to have a Meta account. And visa versa, it's a scam. You can't delete your Meta's Threads account, unless you delete your Instagram.

This is not true. Each Instagram account has the ability to log into Threads. But it's opt-in. If you don't want to use Threads then don't sign up for it. Meta is not duplicating Instagram accounts automatically into Threads.

And yes, you can't delete your Threads account since it is your Instagram account. Threads is more a feature flag that they turn on/off on your IG account. I agree that they should make it possible to turn that feature off in the future.

I think it should be two different accounts all together. Opting-out on Threads should be as easy as opting-in.

But are you sure about opt-in? I heard people saying that they see users in 'suggested followings' section, which have an Instagram account but not a Threads account. But yet listed as suggested on Threads.

I don’t think it should be two accounts because that will break interoperability between Threads and Instagram. But having said that I agree that you should be able to disable/opt-out Threads with your IG account.

When you first sign up into Threads it will ask you if you want to follow everyone you follow on Instagram. This will allow you to follow people that are already on Threads and it will automatically follow the people that will sign up for Threads later. But you can’t tag people that haven’t signed up for Threads yet. So it’s definitely opt-in but it has a discoverability mechanic built in to make it easier for you to find people + potentially follow people that may sign up in the future.

I tried out Threads just to see what the fuss was about. It's mostly just annoying celebrities.

It exists to provide the illusion of competition.

https://mastodon.social/@taylorlorenz/110693385561252959 Elon really made some metric up to claim twitter is healthy

Wouldn't cumulative user-seconds of screen time per day be plummeting if you can only see 500 tweets per day or whatever that limit was that he rolled out? I'd be doubting any company's claims of record high viewership at a time when most of their users were reportedly being locked out of the site due to a new policy, even if their metric didn't have such an oddly specific name.

Is this considered masochism? This seems like masochism.

Now if only my feed can only show the accounts I'm actually following

What’s profitable about that? Just a thing that’s useful and relevant to your interests?

Linking these to instagram accounts is textbook anti-trust behavior to establish market positions

Not a goddamn thing about this is 'organic'

I don't see the problem with it, it just sounds like the logical thing to do. You can log into any Google service with a Google account, so log into an Instagram service with an Instagram account too. You can also already log into Instagram with a Facebook account, so this isn't even unprecedented within Meta.

I don't think anybody's saying there's anything wrong with using Instagram accounts as the base to access the platform. It'll become federated soon, so that won't be a requirement for long.

The issue that some people take, myself included, is that those aren't really "new" users, so calling it "growth" is disingenuous. They're already Instagram users. It effectively makes Threads just Instagram+. Not that that's inherently a bad thing, but it's not really "organic growth" as Zuck is calling it. There's nothing to "grow" if the user base already existed in the first place; it's just the same user base having access to a new feature.

I can see where you're coming from, but the "growth" they're tracking doesn't seem to be the number of Instagram accounts, but the number of accounts that have signed up for Threads. From a business perspective, they're still growing a new service. Even if these are still the same people who are already using Instagram, they're increasing their engagement with Instagram's services and spending more time there. Now those people are using their Instagram account for photo sharing and microblogging instead of switching to Twitter for that, and more engagement means more ad interaction.