On the evening of July 5, Meta went live with its new social app, Threads. over 5 million users signed up in 4 hours, over 10 million users in 7 hours, and 30 million users in 24 hours, breaking ChatGPT's record.
On July 7, a Twitter account named Elon Musk (parody) tweeted, "I spent $44 billion on this app and now Lizard Boy decided to copy and paste. It's personal now Zach, see you in the cage." It's a parody of Musk's account, and the first message below the tweet is from Musk himself, "A lot of people think this account is me."
But perhaps the tweet speaks right to Musk, who's been in the thick of a fight with Zuckerberg lately, with both sides reportedly looking to train with personal trainers as if they're going to get real. So does the fight have anything to do with Threads, and is Threads a threat to Twitter?
The most enthusiastic place to discuss Threads is Mastodon, a newly emerging decentralized social platform. Mastodon's user scale was originally not large, Musk's acquisition of twitter after some operation like a tiger, resulting in a lot of users fled to Mastodon.Mastodon's users to the rate of a few thousand an hour growth, as of July 2, the total number of Mastodon users nearly 1300. As of July 2, the total number of Mastodon users was close to 13 million.
Threads quickly became Mastodon's #2 trending topic when it went live, and by July 7 there were several thousand review messages about it. The thing that people tweeted about the most was that once you sign up for a Threads account you can't delete it, because deleting a Thread account deletes your Instagram account as well.
In addition, it has been found that Threads collects no less user data than Facebook and Instagram, including at least purchase history, financial information, location, contact information (physical address, email address, name, phone number), search history, browsing history, identifiers (user ID, device ID), and more.
While vocalizing the evils of Threads, people are praising one of its advancements - Threads will plan to adopt a decentralized protocol, ActivityPub, which will allow users to interact across social platforms in the future.
In traditional social platforms, users' data exists on the platform's servers and is controlled by the platform. For example, twitter's data is controlled by Twitter, Instagram account data is controlled by Instagram, Youtube account data is controlled by Youtube, each social platform is a closed garden surrounded by different platforms do not communicate with each other.
ActivityPub, on the other hand, is an open protocol that defines communication standards for servers that form a federated network that allows different social platforms to communicate and share content with each other.
The news that Threads will adopt ActivityPub has definitely increased users' favor and expectation for it, it means that Threads users can move freely and send messages to their friends on other social platforms in the future.
Some media outlets have quipped that this is a decentralization of social media, that it won't change the basic function of the social network, but that it creates a model where users can choose to entrust their information to a server that is less predatory of their data.
Facebook almost ruled the global social network market except China, but in 2016 it sold the data of 50 million users to Cambridge Analytica, which used big data analysis to manipulate voters and help Trump succeed in being elected as the US president, a matter that brought Facebook into disrepute.
Coupled with the rise of web3 in the past few years has been strongly advocating decentralization and anti-censorship, people's call for the protection of privacy and data ownership is growing, the sudden fire late last year, web3 app Damus is catering to this need, but Damus is just a flash in the pan, and no one is interested in it today.
Although Facebook, Instagram, Twitter is still as high as 2.989 billion, 2.35 billion, 450 million monthly users, but social media has reached the time to have to change, which is the reason why Musk acquired Twitter, just so far, we can not see the real direction of his transformation of twitter.
But the emergence of Threads, at least let us see Facebook this social empire self improvement of a little hope.
