15 Comments

First Ed Zitron, and now you, I think both of you have this right.

I tried Mastodon, Post, and the splintered Mastodon (Countersocial) and none of them felt at all like it would replace Twitter for me. I am not a journalist, I am a leading edge Gen X, and I found a good Product Management (my profession) community on Twitter that had become far less useful in the last 5 years (clickbait and listicles seem to kill everything), and I see no reason to wade into the certain dumpster fire that is any product by Meta.

I applaud your honest review. The first half dozen reports that hit the wires last night were all glowing testimonials that Threads felt like 2011 era Twitter, and I just struggled to believe it. Now I can avoid the temptation to create an account on Instagram to access this.

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The issue not specifically mentioned here, but lurking in the background: who pays for the service to exist? Mastodon is 'begware' (please support my server). Threads, apparently is a massive advertising dump, but so much it is no longer that 'town square', it is a 'mall' (incidentally: who pays for, maintains, cleans up, polices a real town square? answer: the tax payer). Bluesky may succeed if it solves the issue Twitter has with advertising (in my experience Twitter was really bad at it), their route seems to be 'quality'. In the end, the question is: who pays for the service to exist (servers, bandwidth, personnel, etc.)? A 'commercial town square' might be a contradiction.

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This reads like wishcasting

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Eh, maybe. Just offering initial reactions, ~24 hours in.

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Enjoying Post for no drama, no personal data scraping, news centered content and interesting people. Then again any platform is better than the hell site right now.

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Hilariously, I have seen people who were bullish about Threads two days ago abandon it yesterday because they are down-ranking politics and news. The hype cycle sure does move quickly these days.

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Is the image at the top of this post from an AI generator?

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I found tribel.com and am quite happy. Has interplay and is easy unless you can't type

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Have you tried T2?

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I fully agree. I think it will turn into the same kind of sandbox Twitter has become. Like you...hard pass.

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Threads is just nice because everyone is there

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But I do miss the old twitter

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I didn't intend to but I signed up for Threads yesterday. The app itself is certainly limited at this but it seems fairly clean. I like the fact that I could selectively pull some of my Instagram contacts, the ones who were my favorites on Twitter before I bailed. Bluesky may be superior but I don't know so many people there. Wait and see for both but I was surprised by what I do like about Threads.

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I got briefly pleased when I saw I the list of insta contacts, and was selecting them and thinking "it's actually gonna be really nice to hear from these people!"

But their posts aren't showing up in my feeds. My feed is all influencers and brands. So it doesn't really matter if people I like are there

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There are some settings you can adjust plus I'm doing a lot of muting.

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