As the eminent Twitter of its time, Twitter served up a lively, often incoherent mix of paradigm-shifting cultural phenomena (Arab Spring, the Me Too movement, Black Twitter ), breaking news, corporate existentialist brand building , tweet-addled U.S. presidents and hardcore porn.
Now, we’ve got options — maybe too many at this point — and Meta’s newly launched Twitter clone Threads just opened its doors. People are flooding in, mostly thanks to Meta’s shrewd decision to whisk people over to Threads straight from Instagram. Getting started on Threads is a seamless process for normal users, but most importantly it’s frictionless for brands, government officials, influencers and celebrities — so frictionless that 30 million people signed up in less than 24 hours.
Threads isn’t Mastodon , with its mildly Byzantine sign-up process and thoughtful community of open source enthusiasts. Nor will it be Bluesky, a fleeting locus of glee and chaos that’s recently made some worrisome moderation missteps and remains mired in its ties to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (whose famous last words were “Elon is the singular solution I trust”). Happily, it isn’t 2023’s Twitter either, with its Musk-imposed rate limits, newly Nazi-friendly policies and unpaid bills.
So what is Threads, exactly? Right now, less than 24 hours in, it’s a chaotic and celebratory refuge for people relieved to simply have a version of Twitter that actually works. And unlike on Bluesky, the Brands are pouring in — and they’re most of the equation for Meta.
When you get past the stuff that actually made Twitter fun (e.g. Balloon Boy Twitter, Four Seasons Total Landscaping Twitter, 30-50 feral hogs Twitter ), the platform was a place where brands could park and reliably communicate to their customers. Sometimes that was the cringey business of taking a bank shot off of a TikTok meme, like a dead Sonic the Hedgehog wishing Grimace a happy birthday from a pool of purple goo. More often it was really mundane stuff, like customer service, real-time updates and company blog posts.
To be clear: Threads isn’t going to be fun. This is Meta we’re talking about — fun isn’t the point at all. Instagram isn’t fun either, but it does function well as a personal landing page for anybody trying to sell something or build a brand . The rest of us just shuffle around in there a lot for lack of anything else to do, which seems to work well for Meta.
We're moving to Threads, the new Instagram connected app. Give us a follow there. We'll keep hanging around here for a while, but all new content that's Tweet/Thread worthy will now be posted on Threads.
