Meta’s threads are unspools
The Meta Threads app: a social network app to monitor and protect the data privacy of Twitter, Mastodon, and Activity Pub
The app will land in app stores as this newsletter goes out, I spent the past few hours testing Threads. Like many of the others that have launched in the past few months, it is only an app that works with text messaging.
Adam Mosseri said in an interview with The Verge that they thought it was a good idea to build something that was open and good for the community.
It opens a feed that is similar to the home timelines of major social networking sites. Unlike Twitter’s feed, Threads contains recommended posts from around the network — at this stage, a useful way of knowing what’s happening on the app. It is not possible to view a feed of only the users that you follow. (There are also no hashtags, no edit buttons, and no way to search for anything other than user handles.)
Meta is extending privacy controls to Threads, for example the ability to limit the use of certain words in replies. You can also limit who can reply to your threads to everyone on the platform, people you follow, or only the users who you mentioned in your post.
Meta isn’t including Threads support for ActivityPub at launch. The decentralized social networking protocol, also used by Mastodon, would make it possible to transfer your information from Threads to another host, among other things.
At the moment, the priority is to launch Threads in all of the countries where Meta wants to. Meta works to ensure that Threads is compliant with the EU’s new data privacy regulations, which will prevent it from launching in the European Union.
Some of the laws that will come into effect next year are complicated to comply with. We want to launch things that are compatible with what we know and what we think will happen. 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.
How to Make Meta Threads a Party? A Conversation with Adam Mosseri about the Launch and Early Times of Threads Social Media Moderation
The real question is if Meta can make a place that feels like a party and entice you to hang out over the alternatives.
This is the thing that Bluesky built on a different protocol and got right. The basic software is what it is. The people who use the invitation only app seem to be having a good time. Its team has wisely slowed the pace of invitations in hopes it can retain the goofy, shitposting ethos that has defined it so far, and that has kept me coming back every day to see what people are talking about.
Mosseri says it is simpler to get a bunch of people to try something than it is to build something.
And if nothing else, Threads seems likely to annoy Elon Musk into making even worse mistakes than he has so far. I wouldn’t be surprised if he challenged Mosseri to a martial arts fight, as he previously challenged Mark Zuckerberg.
“That’s between those guys,” Mosseri laughed. When we spoke, the launch of Threads was mere hours away, and he was late for a meeting. I want to get this thing out the door so that it works real well, and I need to make sure it is fast. And I’ll let them engage on the rest.”
The early hours of Threads have been pleasant and light on drama. But that is what you would expect from a user base that is mostly made up of celebrities and people who work on the photo sharing service.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23785194/meta-threads-twitter-social-media-moderation-adam-mosseri
What do we really want to do with Twitter? The frustration of Mosseri, as a social-network CEO, when Meta launched Threads
Mosseri has been working out of London for a year and he is frustrated that it will take a while. “I’ve been on a total kick with my teams about stop launching things in only a couple countries, and not in other countries. … But in this case, it was either we wait on the EU, or delay the launch by many, many many months. And I was worried that our window would close, because timing is important.”
Where’s the money in all this for Meta? Likely ads, though as is typically the case when Meta launches a new product, it will be ad-free to start as the company explores whether it can attract enough users to make it a meaningful business opportunity. “Honestly, we’re not focused on it at all right now,” Mosseri said.
“There definitely are trade offs,” Mosseri said. You have given up some control. But there are benefits. It will be a more compelling value proposition that other apps are going to offer over time, according to me. It should attract more creative talent over the long run.
It is an almost unthinkable reversal from Meta’s very lucrative walled-garden strategy, which has employed for its entire history as a company. Mosseri told me that decentralization is the future of social networks, even if it means that one day a Threads user will be able to take the following they build in the app to another network, never to return.
As it turns out, Mosseri had his team give that a shot. But everything they tried felt forced, and out of place. The thing that makes Twitter distinctive, Mosseri said, is that replies are given the same visual priority as the original posts. In a world where every other social network buries comments underneath posts, Twitter elevates them. And that encourages people to participate in discussions.
By the standards of Twitter 2.0, though, it can feel like a miracle. Reading unlimited posts for free? On a robust network that basically never goes down? Following a stable set of community guidelines, is that monitored by a robust team of content moderators?
Had Meta launched this app in 2019, it seems safe to say, everyone would have rolled their eyes. Its big new feature is … logging in with Instagram? Come on.
It’s basically Twitter in 2010, in other words, with one nice feature that has been added since then: the quote-tweet, which Mastodon has avoided adding but turns out (I think) to be an essential feature of the modern-day Twitter experience.
It’s basically just TWiR from there. You can add a photo if you like. Are you going to post your stitches? Strings? Threats? … into the feed. There is a tab that displays your notifications with a heart symbol. You can search for other users. You can reply.
It is easy to follow people on Mastodon, the original social app built on the ActivityPub protocol. To follow someone on Mastodon, you often ave to know their server and complete username (I’m @[email protected].) On Threads, it’s as easy as typing in their Instagram handle. (I’m @crumbler.) It is a small thing but I think it could make a big difference.
You log in with your Instagram handle. If you like, you can import your Instagram bio and photo with a single click as well. You can choose to follow anyone on Threads who you already follow on Instagram; as your Instagram follows join Threads, you’ll follow them automatically as well.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23785194/meta-threads-twitter-social-media-moderation-adam-mosseri
The Last Frontiers of Social Media: Meta, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the Future of Big Tech (or Less Consolidated, Not More)
With every passing day, though, that latter statement becomes less true. The decision by Musk to limit free users to seeing 600 posts a day has caused a fresh wave of users to look for alternatives.
The social network I used most was beginning to break due to the fact that we were still two months into the ownership of Musk. For my own sake, it felt important that something like Twitter continue to exist — a place to share news, jokes, and other short snippets of writing, in a chatty public place that gave me a sense of the daily conversation.
On one hand, the history of Facebook and Instagram offer plenty of reasons why the company might be poorly suited to run Twitter’s successor as well. Over the years, there have been many failures related to content moderation. If Meta succeeds here, it will expand into one of the last frontiers of social networking which was not already dominant. Generally I want Big Tech to be less consolidated, not more.
