As you may have heard, yesterday Meta finally launched Threads, its Twitter-like microblogging service, built on ActivityPub, but using Instagram account credentials for login. The reaction from across the internet has been fascinating. I’ve seen everything from people insisting that this will clearly finally be the one single “Twitter killer” everyone’s been waiting for, to this is the microblogging equivalent of Steve Buscemi saying “how do you do, fellow kids.”
Clearly, lots of people were willing to check it out. Mark Zuckerberg (on Threads) claimed that 2 million people signed up in just the first few hours.
Of course, I got that screenshot on the web (which lets you see things, but not login or post to Threads). When I tried to get a copy of it from the mobile app where you can actually post, I got this:
So, uh, yeah, still some kinks to work out.
By this morning, Zuck was saying Threads had 30 million signups in its first day.
I mean, that’s what you get for bootstrapping on a social network and social graph that already has over 2 billion users. Some are complaining that this is an example of Meta leveraging its “dominant” position to enter a new market, but as I explain below, I don’t think this is so bad, because the open protocol nature of this means it’s actually resistant to the worst potential exploitation.
I have no idea how Threads will do. It’s possible it’ll catch on. It’s possible it’ll flop. I have no real crystal ball on how it will do, and people who are insisting that one outcome or the other is inevitable are just guessing, so they can claim they knew it all along when whatever happens, happens.
What Meta does have, though, is the ability to scale this. While there is a relatively small team working on it, apparently just “a few dozen” Instagram employees, Meta does have the infrastructure in place to scale if it does catch on, which still remains a challenge for basically everyone else.
And, it’s not just the technical infrastructure, but the trust and safety infrastructure as well. Not that I think anyone is going to say that Meta has been particularly good at handling trust and safety challenges, but they have people and they have technology… and (importantly) they have experience.
But, still, the bigger, and more important part here, is just the fact this is built on ActivityPub. Back in December, I talked about when Mastodon/ActivityPub might have its “Gmail moment,” where a big company steps in and offers a better UI, better features, and a simpler onboarding setup.
While a bunch of mid-sized companies have embraced ActivityPub, including Mozilla, Medium, and Flipboard, Meta is in a different league altogether. And that has both advantages and disadvantages.
But, the important point to me, and the one thing that matters, is that this shows that big companies can make use of interoperable protocols to build on, rather than building up silos. While Threads does not currently interoperate with the rest of the fediverse, the company has made clear that it intends to do so at some point, and even included this fact in the splash screen when you first setup Threads:
And that’s important. For the last two decades, the big internet companies have mostly focused on building their own proprietary silos, rather than using open protocols and interoperating.
Now, it’s true that some of the new European regulations coming into force put pressure on tech companies to interoperate more, but it remains to be seen how well that actually works (and notably, Threads is not available in the EU, as they found it impossible to currently comply with GDPR requirements). What is clear and is notable, is that this is the first time in a long time that we’ve seen a “big tech” company embrace an open protocol.
And, yes, some people fear that the goal is to “embrace, extend, extinguish,” to use the old Microsoft playbook. But the nice thing about protocols is it actually creates incentives against doing so. Because of its open nature, if you don’t like where Meta is going with threads, you can go elsewhere. But you can do so without losing your ability to communicate with those in your network who remain on Threads.
That’s powerful and it’s how the internet was always supposed to work, but which we’ve gone away from.
Indeed, one way to look at this is that it’s Meta bringing many millions of new people to the protocol-based decentralized social media world. And even if plenty stay within Meta’s private park, it will allow those outside the network to communicate with those inside, and also to highlight how they can get the same basic thing without having to cough up data to Meta.
So, I’m personally not that excited about Threads as a product, nor am I all that worried about it doing something bad for the fediverse. I am excited that it shows how big companies can make use of open protocols in a manner that keeps the internet more open, enabling communication not just within a single silo, but where the users have more control, rather than a single centralized company.
Having more of that is a good thing.
And, while I know a bunch of Mastodon instances are planning to defederate from Threads as soon as it connects to the wider fediverse, I think the statement put out by Mastodon creator, Eugen Rochko, is actually quite thoughtful about all this:
We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years. The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.
I agree completely. This is validation of open protocols and pushing power to the ends of the network, rather than just another silo. That, alone, is a good thing that should be celebrated.