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What should we do about Threads?
(programming.dev)
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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Fediverse
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In the grand scheme, though, no one uses either mastodon or lemmy. I'm sure, to the devs and people who joined before 2021, that a couple million users seems like an enormous victory (and it is), but relative to a half billion twitters, the 1.5 billion instagrammers, or even the 5+M that signed up for Threads on the first day, it's nothing.
Those Threads users aren't part of Lemmy or Mastodon, they're part of Threads. They don't have to know what Lemmy or Mastodon are, even as they benefit from content created there. Once Threads is big enough, they either DOS non-corporate instances with mountains of data, disable those instances with protocol-breaking customizations, or just ignore them because all the biggest communities and content are hosted at Threads.
When mozilla & google started working together, Firefox was the majority browser and chrome a ridiculous upstart trying to squeeze into a domain dominated by IE and FF. The fediverse does not have mozilla's power in that analogy. I mean, fediverse may survive after that, but the commercial players will absolutely siphon off anyone who cares more about the user experience and content than about privacy on a public forum, which probably means the user base of July 2022, not July 2023.
Half a billion Twitter users? At its peak Twitter had 300 million monthly users. Or are you talking total number of Twitter accounts, even the ones that have been lying dormant since 2016?
Twitter has always been an also-ran as a social media site. Despite being a "major" and "international" site, its peak user count was smaller than a lot of strictly-regional social media sites. Sina Weibo, for example, was until recently regarded as a failure because it had "only" 600 million active users, and that's a single-nation site for all practical purposes, against Twitter's "international" membership. (With a major cash and marketing push from new owners Ali, Weibo has grown quite a bit since those failure days, mind. It still has only about 600 million active users, but it's become quite an influential social hub at the expense of Tencent's QZone.)