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.
I worked for a guy, many years ago, small scale version of Musk. Guys like that hate to be contradicted. He had gone into partnership with my old company - which was a digital election company (back in the 90s and early 00s). We prided ourselves on our security and anonymity measures. Under this new company, this guy because CEO, and the first thing he did was tell everyone we could make “millions” by selling user data. I pointed out that violated out privacy and anonymity standards, and not even the next day I was reprimanded for speaking out.
You don’t need to be a billionaire to be stupid. Affluent is enough of a threshold. These are all grifters, granted many being successful. The grifters in this company were big fish/little pond. But they ruined a lovely little company that could have been stable and steady, recession-proof income for decades. Instead, they grifted the angel investors, ran the company into the ground and ended up spawning dozens of competitors in the field whereas before there were only 2 or 3.
These guys go from start-up grift to start-up grift, maintaining their affluence on the investor’s dime. I would say they, and the vulture capitalists they dance with deserve each other, but unfortunately, regular folks are always the collateral damage.
Musk was likely always an idiot, but was propped up by money, and earlier on either knew his place (as the “faceman”) or was adroitly distracted from direct involvement with the actual running of the company he bought.