Image source: Merlina McGovern, Screenshot of Instagram profile (follow me on Threads a lacalaveracat).
Seeing as how I’m Threads user number 28,956,720, I’m guessing that the introduction of yet another alternative to Twitter is doing pretty well for itself. (If you’re on the Threads app, you can see your Thread number in your Instagram profile. See the red arrow in the photo above.)
Why did I join yet another social media app? Well, since I’ve gone into the freelancing business, and I hope to one day write and publish a book, I’m trying to make an effort to build up some type of social media audience. My audience on all of the apps I’ve joined is quite small, with my Instagram account being the most anemic, sadly. I say sadly, because Threads is powered by Instagram, which means that you must have an Instagram account before you can get a Threads account. I’ve been on there for just one day, and I’ve got a grand total of five whole followers! It took me a few months to get a couple hundred followers on Medium, and I’m hoping that with close to 30,000,000 followers on the app (a number that’s sure to skyrocket in the coming days), surely, I can eke out a few hundred more on Threads.
Some of the things that I’ve noticed during my first day with the app:
Easy to join. I already had an Instagram account, so it was fairly seamless to set up my Threads account. The challenge that I had with Mastodon was that finding a server and then actually joining it was quite painful. Joining Threads was easy.
Smooth scrolling. Of course, since Twitter’s bonehead owner couldn’t be bothered to pay his bills, there was always a good chance that the site would be down, even before he decided to limit the amount of Tweets users could view. I really wanted to like Mastodon, but I found that because the server I was on was quite small, the feed wouldn’t respond very smoothly, so scrolling through it was not always pleasant or quick enough to feed my social media addiction.
Totally algorithm-driven feed. Ugh. This is the worst aspect of Threads so far for me. I loved the old Twitter because my feed was a chronological feed of the people I followed. I followed them because I found them interesting. And I loved to follow news organizations and journalists, and the things they tweeted were timely. Seeing posts in my Threads feed hours after they are posted is just not the same as my old Twitter feed. And it will absolutely not work for things like weather alerts and emergency posts -- those need to be timely and not driven by an algorithm. There are articles (like this one on Mashable) out there for how you can make your Threads feed not show people you don’t follow, but it doesn’t always seem to work for me. There will be times when my feed is just full of random posters that are posting threads of absolutely zero interest to me. I hope this gets fixed soon.
No desktop app. This is another one that I hope Meta addresses soon. I’m old. I like to type. I hate using my thumbs to write out posts. I use punctuation. Sometimes I even have to use the shift button. I’m not young and hip, typing up a zillion “where my fam at?” posts. I need a desktop app if I’m going to be posting threads with any frequency.
Verification. Even though Meta does indeed now sell verification badges, it also doesn’t actively work to remove blue checks from actual real people (like some other bird apps do). It’s so nice to see actual verification badges and be reasonably sure that I’m not following a fake Soledad O’Brien account.
Of course, it’s only day one! And of course, this is an app from the evil Zuckerberg Meta empire. And we all know that he’s already sucking up all of my data and information so that he can sell it to the highest bidder who will then target me with election misinformation. But, hey, besides all that, I’m really liking it!
Kidding aside, I was so despondent when a petulant and petty billionaire purchased what was really our only digital town square. Old Twitter was a place where you could read news from the Washington Post and also from your local news outlet, as well as what Chrissy Teigen was eating for brunch or what a popular physicist was excited about in rocket science research. Not only could you read this wide variety of information, you could also actually reach out to these posters with your own thoughts and be part of the public conversation.
I’m not sure what I can hope for from Threads, but I do know that Twitter was becoming a cesspool of hate, bigotry, and scammy advertisements, and I needed to get off of it.
How about you? Have you joined Threads? If so, feel free to share your handle in the comments below!
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