Meta is competing with other channels on social media

Building a Successful App for Facebook: How Did You Get Your Threads? Reflections on Mosseri and the Development of ActivityPub

Threads will eventually be integrated into ActivityPub, a social media protocol that powers Mastodon. That integration isn’t ready at launch, though, as I previously reported. When it’s enabled, Threads users will be able to interact with Mastodon users and take their accounts with them to other clients that support the ActivityPub standard.

There are a couple of different things. The idea is that we have an amazing creative community on the photo sharing site. We have amazing creators on the platform. We thought we could use the platform to build something that was open and good for the community that was already using it, and that’s what we built.

In terms of what success looks like for Threads, Mosseri tells me that he isn’t interested in killing Twitter or even getting the app to Instagram-level scale of over 1 billion users: “It would be great if it gets really, really big, but I’m actually more interested in if it becomes culturally relevant than if it gets hundreds of millions of users.”

We wanted to see what it would look like. Is that a tab in the app? Is it bringing text to feed? Is this a separate app? A bunch of different people [inside Meta] were playing in this space, as you can imagine. You have a good amount of sources, I know. I’m sure you heard a bunch of different things. People all over the company were playing. Instead of building a bunch of things that aren’t very well, we try to place a meaningful, risky, but compelling bet by pulling everything together. It all came together in the late winter.

There was nothing specific about how Musk is handling the Twitter platform that led you to move. There are a lot of things one could point to, I think.

I do think there’s a lot more noise around Twitter than there was. The unpredictable nature of what seemed to be going on could present an opportunity. If things like stability became a problem or the product changed too much, it could leave an opening for us to compete in a space that otherwise looked difficult to compete in.

I want to be clear: any time you build a new app from scratch, it is much less likely to succeed than to succeed. So this is still a risky endeavor, but it just seemed like the landscape was changing. People were interested in alternatives to having a conversation. It’s not just us playing in the space in addition to Twitter, obviously. There is a really strong creator community here. So it just seemed worth at least putting a small team together to explore some ideas. We had a design and we were excited about it, so we were like, let’s take a swing and see what happens.

It was a hugely contentious debate internally. You could be in the food. You could be a separate tab. You could be a separate app. The challenge with text posts in feed is that they do not support public discourse as well as they did withtweet and reply, which is why the model that was pioneered by Twitter is different. Treating replies as equal as opposed to subordinate somehow just allows for a very different and much more broad range of public conversations. People do post text to Instagram all the time, even though we don’t support it first class, and we’re experimenting with that, too. That’s great, but I think it solves a much smaller use case than public discourse more broadly.

There is a separate app and a separate tab. Separate tab is tough. There’s only so much stuff you can shove in the app. It’s already feeling too complicated. It is working against that, because we are attempting to simplify right now. And generally, when you build a separate tab, you find you want to push all that distribution through a feed invariably in order to bootstrap it. You kind of end up right back in that first problem.

Creators are a really good example. Creators are becoming more and more savvy. They’re using more and more platforms. It’s becoming rarer that a creator is completely attached to one platform because they’re always worried about the risk of being overly beholden to one company that they obviously can’t control. So I do think this is the direction of travel, and I think that a new app offers us the opportunity to really step into this space. It would be very, very difficult to take an existing app like Instagram and then integrate it.

So, you know what they say, higher beta. More possibilities, more risks. Not everything we do like this is going to work, but we should always be placing a couple of high-risk bets like this if we’re going to hope to really evolve forward as fast as I think we need to as a company.

What are we doing now that aren’t Facebook? What will we learn from launching standalone apps? The case of Activity Pub, Mastodon

The irony of that name is not lost on you, you shut down another app a couple of years ago, naming it after this one.

And you know this, too: You all’s track record on launching standalone apps in-house, they don’t tend to live after several years. Do you have any conviction that this time will be different? You described this as a bet. Are you making a long term commitment?

I’ve been involved in a handful of new apps over the years. We made mistakes when building something that was too similar to Facebook, and I think that’s why. It wasn’t a new version of Facebook. Why do you want to do that? It was the same content as Facebook. The same content was found in paper as it was on Facebook. I think we pivoted too far away from that. We kind of overcorrected toward things that didn’t seem to really lean on any strategic strengths that we had. We were not building any new apps.

The ActivityPub element of this I’m fascinated by. I reported a few months ago that the plan was recently integration with that. Day one is not when it will happen. Why not do that at the beginning of the year?

Why are we doing it? I believe more and more people are going to like and appreciate more open systems. I think it is the direction of travel for the industry. It is going to be painful for a lot of the larger platforms that already exist. But as people become more and more savvy about the benefits and the risks involved with using any of these platforms, then I think they’re going to be demanding more.

This lets us learn because we can get a lot of feedback and criticism on how we integrate with the Mastodon networks. I have learned so many things from talking to people in the community. This is us leaning into where I think the world is going. And also, it has some really kind of nice benefits. I think the average creator today on Instagram probably doesn’t know what Mastodon or ActivityPub is and probably doesn’t need to. Some interesting opportunities arise when you start to think about the implications of integration over the long run.

The one that I think resonates the most with creators, in my experience, is that you should own your audience. If you decide to leave Threads one day, you should be able to bring your audience with you. I’ve talked about this idea in a couple of different contexts. There are, I think, better ways to do this over the long run, but I do think ActivityPub allows you to support that. I think we might be a more compelling platform for creators, particularly for the newer creators who are more and more savvy, if we are a place where you don’t have to feel like you have to trust us forever or you can build up an audience, and then you can bring that audience with you elsewhere if you really have to at the end of the day.

That’s just one example of a benefit. I think there will be more over time. Meta is trying to empower creators, learn and be honest about the fact that we are not from the same phase of the internet as others, and also try to lean into where the world is going. We know that we need to evolve, or else we run the risk of becoming irrelevant. Let us be open-minded and try new things, learn, and adapt, since we are all in this together.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23784870/instagram-threads-adam-mosseri-interview-twitter-competitor

Timing in the Threads app: How do we manage to rank, report flows, strikes with accounts, and rank ranks? An Instagram-threads interview with Adam Mosseri

We were not able to have time. It requires a bunch more work. Think about everything we have to do. Like, if you’re building safety classifiers, you need to be able to run those classifiers on datasets that aren’t our typical datasets, right? How do we classify what is posted on other accounts in the Threads app? There’s a bunch of engineering work there. How do reporting flows work? How does strikes with accounts work? How does ranking work?

We knew it was going to slow us down. We wanted to launch with support. We had to leave because I felt the window was going to close anyways. As soon as possible, we have to follow this. If that’s a while later, it’s a while later. And that’s unfortunate. But at some point, I think timing is everything. I was trying to make it possible for us to see our window.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23784870/instagram-threads-adam-mosseri-interview-twitter-competitor

Does Facebook Messenger Have an Impact on Telecom Users? A View from the Mosseri Interview of Twitter Competing Platforms (Instagram/Twitter)

We don’t want to do any direct mails. I don’t know if that’s going to last as a decision, but particularly in the US, I think people have a little bit of inbox fatigue. We all have a lot of different inboxes that we manage. What do you use for your sources? How about a signal?

Yeah, exactly. But there’s iMessage. The majority of people in the US use Facebook Messenger on Android rather than on the App Store. There is definitely a lot of use of the account, which has been on fire recently. Everyone in Europe uses the same messaging system, but I live in Europe where it is not used as much.

The idea was to lean into openness, to allow people to share threads on other DM networks. And ideally, that would happen on Instagram DMs, but it could happen anywhere. And we’ll see if that is sufficient. Maybe it’s not for a modern social network, but maybe it is. It is possible that we could bootstrap it out of nothing if it is, but we have to avoid further fragmenting the space, and allow people to raise awareness of any threads on any network, which could be good.

Threads is only available in a limited number of countries, but not the European Union. It’s being excluded from the EU initially due to “the complexities with complying with some of the laws coming into effect next year,” according to Mosseri. The Digital Markets Act places a lot of new legal obligations on platforms like Meta.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23784870/instagram-threads-adam-mosseri-interview-twitter-competitor

Am I bummed about this? Taming the complexities of forward-compliant developments at MetaXaS in the face of the US

The complexities with complying with some of the laws coming into effect next year are significant. We don’t want to launch anything that isn’t forward-compatible with what we know and what we think is coming. It’s just going to take longer to make sure not only that it’s compliant but that any claims we make about how we’ve implemented compliance stand up to our very high set of documentation and testing centers internally.

To be really honest, I’m bummed about it. For the last year, I have been living outside of the US. I’m on a total kick pushing teams [inside Meta] to stop leaving things half-launched and get them out to the rest of the world. I meet creators that are questioning if they need to relocate to the US to get access to certain features. It hurts my heart. But this one is just going to take a bunch of time.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23784870/instagram-threads-adam-mosseri-interview-twitter-competitor

The challenge of social media marketing: instagram-threads-adam-mosseri-interview-twitter-competitor

If we are successful, we will make something that lots of people like and keep using, so that we can monetize it. I’m confident the business model will be ads. We’re not focused on monetization at the moment. 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.

I don’t think so. There is room for more than one person in different spaces. Network effects are definitely present, and competitive effects are also present. I think there is a couple of major players in the social space between the messaging and stories and feeds. Brazil is a really good example. Brazil has a huge level of status on WhatsApp and Facebook’s photo sharing service. And they both continue to grow really rapidly over the last couple of years, despite the fact that they’re both huge.

I think there will be more and more users on social media. I think success will be creating a vibrant community, particularly of creators, because I do think this sort of public space is really, even more than most other types of social networks, a place where a small number of people produce most of the content that most everyone consumes. It is about creators more than average people because they are more likely to be entertained.

I think a vibrant community of creators is culturally relevant. If it gets hundreds or millions of users, I would be more interested in it, even though it would be great if it got really big. But we’ll see how it goes over the next couple of months or probably couple of years.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23784870/instagram-threads-adam-mosseri-interview-twitter-competitor

The Metaverse: Introducing Threads to the Twitter Masses and the Challenges It Created in the Era of the Takeover of Twitter

This week Meta has been welcoming a bunch of celebrities from around the world ahead of Threads’ public release. Karlie Kloss, Gordon Ramsay, Tony Robbins, Dana White and jack black are just a few of the celebs that are already seen on the app.

Additional functions are not unlocked through a paid verification scheme, though blue checks will port over to Threads accounts. With some exceptions for extreme cases like the sharing of child exploitation imagery, moderation actions Meta takes against a Threads account will not impact its associated Instagram account, according to internal documents I’ve seen.

The platform is not currently showing ads, but once it is running smoothly and is on a clear path to 1 billion people, the change to monetization will happen.

Threads is strikingly similar to Twitter in key ways. There are also posts from accounts that you follow in the app’s main feed. You can repost something with your own commentary, and replies are featured prominently in the main feed. You don’t currently have a feed of only people you follow.

“Obviously, Twitter pioneered the space,” according to Mosseri. There are lots of good offerings for public conversations. But just given everything that was going on, we thought there was an opportunity to build something that was open and something that was good for the community that was already using Instagram.”

The parent company behind Facebook has launched a new social media platform, called Thread, which is the latest of a variety of challengers vying for the throne.

After the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, the social network’s hierarchy of text-based platforms began to look shaky, and it’s only worsened as he continues to make unpopular changes on the platform.

The Twitter-Instagram-MuSK-ZZURGGERGAN: How Mark Zuckerberg Could’ve Easily Launched Threads

There are buttons that can be used to reply or like a thread. Clicking on the number of likes and replies shows you the content of the post. Accounts can be public or private.

Meta already has more than 3 billion users across its stable of apps (which include Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp), and is making it easy for its existing users to start a new account.

After downloading the new app, existing Instagram users have the option of importing standard set-up functions, including their bio, username, profile photo and follow list.

The number of people joining the app as of noon Tuesday was more than 30 million, more than double that on Mastodon and Post.

The users include celebrities like chef Gordan Ramsay, actor Zac Efron and pop star Shakira. Many brands and news outlets were using Threads.

Since news broke that it had long been over reporting its monthly active user count, the company doesn’t offer regular disclosures of its user numbers. The company saw about 326 million active monthly users around that time.

Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Meta, could’ve easily launched Threads around that time. The social network wouldn’t sell and he tried to buy himself.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/06/1186191438/threads-twitter-instagram-musk-zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg and his sister Threads: How to make a good virtual reality app, not just a Twitter app? An analysis of Musk’s tweets

Just last weekend, Musk announced a temporary cap on the number of tweets that non-paying users could view each day. When it was announced that it was impossible to view tweets unless you signed up, it was quickly reversed.

At a time when advertising spending at the platform is down, each policy change sparks a wave of messages about leaving the platform.

Musk previously referred to the sister app of Threads as a “weak sauce”, despite not having responded to NPR’s request for comment.

“It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram,” he wrote in a tweet Thursday.

The app has financial stability in question. There are tens of thousands of layoffs in the tech industry as a whole, and with Facebook’s investment in the Metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg continues to make money in virtual reality.

Threads says it’s aiming to have the app work in the so-called “fediverse,” the federated universe of apps that share similar communication rules. It may be attractive to creators and those with large followings who are hesitant to start on a new platform.

But in the end, the element that might make or break Threads could be outside it’s control: whether its users build it into the culture they’re craving.

It was noted in some of hismissives that they were focused on making Threads a friendly place, and that it wouldultimately be the key to its success.

Tech junkies might counter that Zuckerberg has played (and lost) this game before. He tried to use both Facebook’s Stories feature and the addictive scroll of TikTok. Neither feature successfully bested out the competition.

The strength of the Meta brand may be one of the biggest weaknesses when it comes to getting users in the habit of posting on Threads.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/06/1186191438/threads-twitter-instagram-musk-zuckerberg

The Terrible Uncle Problem: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Good, the Ghoul) Who Are You Looking For?

When all of your relatives, your coworkers and your high school friends are able to find you on social media, it’s the terrible uncle problem, according to Greenwood on Morning Edition. Younger people are turned off from a platform when they feel like they need to be careful what they say.