) On Threads, it’s as easy as typing in their Instagram handle. To follow someone on Mastodon, you have to know their server and complete username (I’m. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s already much easier than following people on Mastodon, the original social app built on the ActivityPub protocol. 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. If you like, you can import your Instagram bio and photo with a single click as well. (There are also no hashtags, no edit buttons, and no way to search for anything other than user handles.) For now, there’s no way to view a feed of just the users that you follow. Unlike Twitter’s, Threads contains recommended posts from around the network - at this stage, a useful way of what’s happening on the app. It opens to a simple feed similar to Twitter’s home timeline. (The full conversation is included in a special episode of Hard Fork that drops tomorrow.) particularly focused on creators,” Mosseri told me and my podcast co-host, Kevin Roose, in an interview Wednesday afternoon. “Our hope is that Threads is an open, friendly place for public conversations. Like many of the other Twitter rivals that have launched in the past few months, it’s a fairly bare-bones interpretation of a text-based messaging app. I’ve spent the past few hours testing Threads, which will begin to land in app stores just as this newsletter goes out. That brings us to today, when Meta is releasing the first version of its new app, Threads. The past week’s astonishingly foolish decision by Elon Musk to limit free users to viewing 600 posts a day - enough for maybe 20 minutes of scrolling, maybe less - has sent a fresh wave of Twitter users looking for alternatives. With every passing day, though, that latter statement becomes less true. New social apps are much likelier to fail than to succeed, and Twitter already had such a devoted user base. In December, Mosseri told me he was torn about whether to move forward with a new Twitter challenger. That’s a level of freedom the users of Facebook or Instagram - or really any other big social app - have never had. Ultimately, Mosseri told me in an interview today, the company hopes to let you take your audience with you when you leave the new app. And Meta ultimately decided to build its Twitter competitor in a decentralized way - setting it up to be interoperable with Mastodon and whatever else might get built in the future on Mastodon. On the other, though, the past few months have shown Instagram to be vastly superior at content moderation than Twitter 2.0 is. Generally I want Big Tech to be less consolidated, not more. And there’s the reality that, should Meta succeed here, it will have expanded into one of the last frontiers of social networking in which it was not already dominant. There’s the litany of failures over the years related to content moderation, of course. 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. 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.Īnd so I told Mosseri that I hoped Meta would go through with it. We were then two months into Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter, and it was clear that the social network I depended on the most was beginning to break. In early December, when word first leaked out that Meta was considering new ways to challenge Twitter, I messaged Adam Mosseri. We know you’re all waiting for more from us on what’s going on at Twitter at the moment - on that front, all we can say right now is to stay tuned. Programming note: I really was trying to take a vacation, but this felt like it was worth the one-day interruption.
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