Threads hits 5M signups in the first four hours (opens in new tab)

Of course it will get ads. Nobody expects otherwise. But right now, under the deal that is, it’s interesting enough to try.

>And I assume you’ll have a similar monetization model? There will eventually be ads in there as well?

>If we are successful, if we make something that lots of people love and keep using, we will, I’m sure, monetize it. And I would be confident that the business model will be ads.

So yea, duh, Meta will monetize it. But it'll be an app hellbent on growing while being subsidized by Meta until then.

I joined Instagram as soon as it was available on Android (2012 I think), and loved it. By that point, Facebook was starting to get a little icky, and I really liked that it was just photos, all positive stuff, and always reverse-chronological.

Then Zuck got his dirty hands on Instagram, and it of course started getting icky in many of the same ways Instagram did. I quit Facebook in 2018, and Instagram not long after, and haven't really looked back. I still would occasionally sign into my FB account for event invitations, but seems like most of my friend group doesn't use FB for that anymore, so that's mostly gone.

Everything Meta touches turns into garbage. It's all about emotional manipulation and getting people worked up about something or other. Your take on Meta/FB from the beginning turned out to be prescient, I think.

I got bad vibes from Facebook from the very start, and steered clear.

But yes they should have a desktop client.

Reason: Meta has been having NDA'd meetings with admins of the larger Mastodon instances, and it's no secret that they intended to have this on the Fedi, which is also not in the current release. My assumption is that the NDA meetings were to promise fiscal help for instance admins who will necessarily get a huge flood of new traffic when Meta brings their tsunami of Intsadiocy to the Fedi infranet; my guess is it will be an amount of money that gives them a fair amount of discretion and which is pretty big to them, but pretty small to Meta. A means of getting the bigger "players" to let them execute their strategy, even knowing full well their intention to follow the Embrace with the formulaic Extend and Extinguish.

Most actual founders who actually know tech things also accept this deal when they get bought out. No reason not to think they'll bite, and most of them did, or at least, they went to the meetings and then started doing syrupy posts about "fair play" and "they get to have a chance," cause clearly the techbros have not yet had a chance to fully implement their genius plan that's totally gonna work guys.

And the whole "we love the openness" thing, I believe that as much as I believe Microsoft love Linux.

Not that Elon isn't their primary target, though why they're bothering I don't know, he's basically sitting in the middle of Main Street, covered in gasoline and holding a lighter screaming for attention. He's gonna get sent somewhere soon. Possibly space, who knows. But has really hung his ass waaaaaay out there the last week or two and I think they couldn't resist the urge to fuck it now rather than later.

Other reason I think they rushed is, the Fediverse as it was a couple weeks ago made their feelings pretty clear about federating with Meta, and I'm pretty sure they have been paying attention (not like the Fedi is private after all). Someone in the structure recognized that if they really do hope to execute the Embrace move, this is not the safe moment to do it.

Which means that the intense month of ActivityPub/Mastodon focused dev they've been doing has been premature, but they couldn't predict the last two weeks a month ago, so they're pivoting the product on the fly to a Twitter-grab posture.

My guess is that the people who were working on AP support are now either developing the WebUI for Threads, or else the implementation to allow people to view Threads through the Insta site, with a lightning fast rollout coming by end of next week.

They will still roll out to Mastodon as well, but I'm pretty sure from what I saw on the Fedi that they have come to understand that this is not the unsuspecting populace that they afflicted with Cambridge Analytica; this is a small subset of that population that learned the lesson thereof. If they hope to have anything to do with it, one thing is certain, they need to move slow.

Same with threads.social, a Mastodon instance.

I had to turn off tracking for the domain to get it to load, looks like it needs the "Social Media Trackers" to load from https://statc.xx.fbcdn.com

https://www.threads.net/@jkottke

After all Instagram and Twitter have really different audiences for a reason.

I still miss it

You only need 0.5% of them to sign up for Threads to surpass Mastodon in users.

> Sign in with Apple is not required if:

> Your app exclusively uses your company’s own account setup and sign-in systems.

I have less than zero interest in zuck-twitter but as far as I know it requires an insta login at the moment, which seems to fall under this exception.