More from The hunt for the next Twitter: all the news about alternative social media platforms
Is Instagram Threads going to become the fastest-growing app of all time? Sure looks like it. Will Meta care about it long-term, will it ever launch in the EU, will Threads ever actually embrace the fediverse? Who knows. Are ads coming to Threads? You betcha.
This week on the show, it’s all Threads all the time.
This morning @Google posted its first message to Threads, and a quick look at its Instagram profile reveals the account is customer number 67,461,606. Mark Zuckerberg might chime in again once Threads passes 100 million registered accounts, which shouldn’t take long at the current pace — about 24 hours ago, the number was 30 million.
Update (12:01PM ET): Zuckerberg confirmed Threads has registered 70 million sign-ups.
After just one day of operation, Instagram’s new social app is already halfway to 100 million accounts. Alex Heath just noted 48 million in this post and a Command Line update sent out today, but the Threads number keeps climbing. (Check the Instagram account of anyone who’s registered, and it will tell you if they were 1st, 50 millionth, or somewhere in between.)
Where do you think Zuckerberg & Co. will be when we wake up tomorrow?
When I went to look at why Mastodon users shouldn’t worry about Meta building on the ActivityPub protocol, I couldn’t — my Mastodon.xyz account had disappeared.
The problem was DNS-related (it’s always DNS, remember Facebook’s massive 2021 outage?), and after a 23-hour, 59-minute break, the server’s back online.
But it shows how decentralization can cut both ways — while this problem didn’t take down all of Mastodon, it left me trying to track down whoever runs my server to find out what happened.
“It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram.” - Elon Musk, @elonmusk (1), (2).
“We’re often imitated — but the Twitter community can never be duplicated.” - Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, @lindayacc.
Threads activated more than 30 million profiles overnight.
For an example of what success looks like on an Instagram scale, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that the goal is to get Threads on a “clear path to 1 billion people” before figuring out monetization.
This mirrors what Adam Mosseri said in an interview with Alex Heath, about the “champagne problem” of making money with Threads:
If we are successful, if we make something that lots of people love and keep using, we will, I’m sure, monetize it. And I would be confident that the business model will be ads. Right now, we are not focused on monetization. We’re very, very focused on just trying to make something that people love to use. And then, if we get something to scale, that’ll be a champagne problem.
Meta’s boss made his last update seven hours ago when it was at 10 million, but more than twelve hours after launch, the pace of registrations (which consists of clicking a button three or four times, assuming you already have one of the 2 billion-plus Instagram accounts) for Threads hasn’t slowed down.
The highest registration number I’ve seen so far (visible on the Instagram profile of a linked account) is 26,051,591.
Update (11:19AM ET): Zuckerberg is awake, and the count is now 30 million, and rising.
Why is Thread’s plan to use the same decentralized protocol (ActivityPub) as Mastodon a “clear victory for our cause,” according to the founder / CEO of Mastodon?
A few of the answers given:
A server you are not signed up with and logged into cannot get your private data or track you across the web.
Unless you use Threads, you will not see any ads from Threads.
even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now
Even if you follow or send a message to a Threads user from your Mastodon account, Threads will not be able to collect any of your private information except the message you sent.
It’s worth reading, even if seeing Meta getting ready to plug millions of users into the fediverse has you a bit worried about the future of other Twitter alternatives.
[Mastodon Blog]
Just as Meta opened the Threads floodgates, fellow Twitter alternative Bluesky announced an $8 million funding round to “expand our team, manage increasing operation and infrastructure costs, and grow the AT Protocol ecosystem as well as the Bluesky app.”
It also announced its first paid service — domain sales. Since Bluesky users can tie their account to any domain they own, it’s partnering with Namecheap to simplify the process, saying users can pick a domain and get it set up in less than a minute.
[blueskyweb.xyz]
Launching a new social network on the back of one that has over a billion users has its advantages — new user accounts on Threads are already showing registration numbers beyond 2 million just two hours after its launch, which Mark Zuckerberg confirmed with a post.
Before the app opened its doors at 7PM ET, there were fewer than 3,000 registered accounts.
If you’re wondering what your number is — it’s listed on your account on Instagram after you join Threads. The official @TheVerge Threads account is #45,093.
The ‘volatility’ of Twitter under Elon Musk has opened a window to compete. It’s a ‘risky’ bet worth trying, says Instagram boss Adam Mosseri.
The Twitter alternative from Meta appears set to launch on July 6th, but the Irish Independent reports that Ireland’s Data Protection Commission has been in contact with the company about the new product and confirmed the launch won’t extend to the EU “at this point.”
The Wall Street Journal wrote about the iOS-only app Spill, which was founded by two former Twitter employees and calls itself “visual conversation at the speed of culture.” On Spill, large text captions over pictures, GIFs, or video clips add the conversational pace of Twitter to the look of Instagram or TikTok.
The future for Twitter alternatives can range from Mastodon to Hive, but Spill’s founders tossing around AI and blockchain buzzwords right out of the gate is probably more impressive to investors than potential users.
With Meta’s Twitter competitor set to launch in just a few days time, there are still a lot of questions about how it’ll work. 9to5Google has dug through its APK to try and find some answers.
One interesting point: although Threads is built on the ActivityPub protocol used by Mastodon and others, it doesn’t look like it’ll be cross-compatible at launch.
Update: When Threads was briefly viewable on the web, a post by Adam Mosseri was visible that confirmed it would not include ActivityPub support on day one.
Meta is teasing a July 6th launch for its Twitter competitor Threads in the Instagram app. Type “threads” into its search box and a small ticket icon will appear that links to an animation showing a 10am ET launch time.
The ticket’s QR code links to threads.net, where there’s another QR code that links to the Threads App Store listing that revealed the July 6th launch date.
The number of active users rose by 294,000 over the weekend, according to CEO Eugen Rochko. I wonder why?
Over the weekend, decentralized microblogging service Bluesky said it was halting signups after issues at Twitter prompted a flood of new users to join and create stability issues. But as of today, that limitation has been reversed.
That said, Bluesky is still invite-only, so you’ll need a unique code to sign up.
Twitter user Alessandro Paluzzi, a developer who’s been publishing leaks about Meta’s upcoming Twitter clone, tweeted early this morning that the app had been released, but it was taken down sometime later.
Paluzzi included screenshots showing the posting UI and the ability to login with Instagram.
The app is no longer available as of this writing.