Honestly not that big of a deal. When something is hyped up users who either didn’t or barely used Twitter (X) probably joined in. It boosted their initial numbers but again they fell off. They’ll grow as unique content grows. That happens with everything, as will the case be with Lemmy. Growth isn’t linear.
I suppose it isn’t linear but I suspect going from massive insane explosion in numbers to an 80% loss in a matter of weeks is pretty unusual. I think that growth was largely driven not by hype but by the automatic linking with other Zuckernedia properties.
Since it already worked with instagram, this was people signing in with their instagram account, checking the app once or twice, and then going back to instagram. The starting numbers where incredibly manipulated because of this single account system between threads and instagram.
I saw a lot of people excited to try it. Losing 80% of its peak users at this point doesn’t seem like a failure to me. Anybody who was curious was counted as a user. I’m sure fediverse sites have had similar, smaller influxes of new users that create an account to check it out and then don’t come back. It takes some determination to move to another social networking ecosystem.
This is what happens when you launch with no content discovery features, so you have to whore yourself out and follow anyone and everyone if you want to get any attention. “Content creators” and clout chasers are the primary customer of this service, so without that I don’t know why they’d want to use it.
“Minimum Viable Product” has been a curse on the industry for so long. This is the clearest example of its failure
Threads had no discovery features?! Jesus Christ…
No hashtags, no full text search. Just an algorithmic feed and a following feed, and you can only search users.
I like how they made the logo look like it says “ADS” throughout.
You forgot the I.
The Ads
damn, reading the data collected from the Play Store made me finally delete my instagram account. the damn app is a free farm of data. fuck zuck
10 million DAU’s is still pretty impressive
It’s just companies and influencers, nobody else is posting much there. And half of the influencers are only there to try to get you to follow them somewhere else. (feed is absolutely crammed with Taylor “not wearing a mask outdoors in 2023 is literally genocide” Lorenz hawking her new YouTube channel and I don’t even follow her)
Meanwhile Mastodon continues growing steadily, and I’m getting as much engagement there as I ever did on Twitter with maybe 10% as many followers.
My one big gripe with Mastadon is that images take absolutely forever to load if they have even a marginal amount of pixels. I scroll art often and I’m left waiting for greater than a minute for these things to load (and I’m on a very, very fast connection).
Talk to your instance admin for that. Mastodon caches remote images and serves it from the local server to local users, so it should be fast unless the admin has something broken or configured wrong.
30/30 fiber here. No such issue. My instance is mstdn.party.
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Good, hopefully it keeps tanking so we don’t have to pay any further mind to it.
They should have implemented activity pub support from day 1. They rushed the roll out because they wanted to make us of Twitter’s (one of many) fuck ups but failed to keep users.
Because it’s so boring. It doesn’t have a “trending” tab and every post is an ad.
Not sure why anyone wanted a second twitter that’s still made by a big-tech
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I don’t understand why someone would choose threads over mastadon, where they could have all the dunking with none of the enshittening.
It’s still too complicated for the layperson to have to navigate. Anything beyond “I have one login at one site that everyone else has” is too much for most.
My grandma put electrical tape over the blinking 12:00 on the vcr she still uses. She’s not ready for 2 factor authentication.
I mean, it is annoying to have to reset the clock every time the power fails. No clock, no problem!
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It’s a mix between heard mentally (well, all my friends are on it) and FOMO (what are they saying about me over there?)
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Similarweb, a digital intelligence platform, shared its data with Gizmodo showing Threads daily active users hovered around 49 million just two days after launch.
David Carr, a senior insights manager at the analysis company, told us the engagement time based on just U.S. user data was slightly more favorable to Threads, but not by much.
Back during its 15 minutes of fame, Threads was leveraged as the fastest-growing platform in the history of apps, hitting 100 million user signups less than a week after launch.
Instagram head Amad Mosseri has also mentioned their intent to connect Threads to the decentralized Fediverse, though whether that drives new-found interest in the app is anyone’s guess.
It was clear from Thread’s launch that users were desperate for a Twitter alternative away from owner Elon Musk’s unending march toward making the platform a pay-to-play hellscape.
A big problem with the app was that it simply didn’t include features found in its main competitors, and the company spent years playing catch up, but all in vain.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Absolutely love this bot. No longer need to leave the app to read articles 💪
It has been sadly disabled for Beehaw at the request of admins/mods, you might want to contact them if you feel it’s useful, there is some discussion about this going on in https://beehaw.org/post/6976148.
+1 Hate that Connect uses a chrome browser and not my system default. :T
You can switch to use the external browser in the app settings, however, at time it affects everything - including images. Once that’s fixed, I’ll probably move back from Sync to Connect!
I mean if you pay attention most social media inundated with influencers and companies is basically:
“Buy this, no buy this, buy this instead, spend your money here!” It even leeches into everyday conversations outside of social media.
Pay attention to how often people talk about buying things and newly released products. Hell, I’ve caught myself contributing to it. It’s kind of gross when you realize how steeped in consumerism nearly everything has become.
Who are they even selling to? Everybody’s broke.
I think there will be more activity once they add more features. It’s very bare-bones right now. I honestly like the app, though, all things considered. I hate Facebook/Meta, but it’s been a nice app to just scroll through, and there’s been enough content to use it as a time killer. They desperately need a proper search feature and a trending page, though, especially if they ever hope to fully replace Twitter. Overall, I like it more than both Mastodon and Bluesky, because discoverability is so awful on Mastodon and Bluesky doesn’t have enough users and content because they haven’t gone public yet. And I very much like the idea and structure of Mastodon much more (with it being open source and federated), but the user experience has been so bad for me, with discoverability being the worst aspect of it.
I think the main method of discovery is through your network, and through your local instance. Federated timeline tends to be chaotic, but I definitely like reading my local timeline on my regional masto instance. But I believe that was the intention on the design, no ‘trending’, no algorithm, just the people you follow.
and hashtags! you cant forget the tags!
Yep, that too.
Yeah, I unironically like trending sections and algorithms, at least to some degree lol I understand the downsides of them, but I enjoy things being shown to me that I’ll usually enjoy seeing. The YouTube algorithm for example, despite how finicky it can be to work with as a creator, is very good as a user, in my opinion.
