…What’s Up With Threads?

So when Threads first launched, I was honestly really excited for it to come out. The idea that a corporate entity with a lot of sway was seemingly going to make a big bet on interoperable social media was a super interesting idea and had the potential to be the thing that got a ton of people onto the Social Web via ActivityPub integration.

Things started to look wrong as Threads dragged their feet on the whole integration to begin with. Very few timelines were ever actually shared and most of them were basically just “yeah we’ll get to it eventually” (and to their credit they did). Eventually we got “fediverse sharing” which allowed a user to natively post to the Social Web, allowing users from Mastodon, GTS, or any of the other integrated platforms to follow Threads users.

At first it was pretty much just a one-way integration that allowed users to follow these accounts, but there was no kind of interaction that was possible. This has eventually expanded to being able to follow remote Social Web accounts from across the network, you can see likes and replies, and for the most part it’s all working.

The big problem is that Threads never leaned into while all of this was happening. The Social Web is consistently treated as a second-class citizen on the platform; remote interactions are, in every case, segregated from the native Threads content. It’s always an afterthought and something that is hidden away from the valued users of their native platform.

I will say, from Meta’s perspective on what a social media app should be, Threads is great. Meta, and more specifically Instagram, really views social media as a marketing tool. You have your content creators who make random posts, then you have the rest of the platform, who likes and comments on that content. They’ve got a great set of platforms for the few to talk at the many. The problem is: that’s not what the Social Web is about. We’re here for conversations and discussion. There’s not a two-tiered system of ‘Content Creators’ and ‘Everyone Else’ here and we’re not just making “content” to keep people paying attention to the app for ad revenue. We have conversations, we share art, and we share ideas; not the amorphous nothingness that is “content”.

From the start, we were hopeful that Threads was going to be something more than what it is, but it’s become increasingly clear that Instagram will never understand or respect the Social Web in any meaningful way. Is it better than nothing? Sure. But that’s about it.