Twitter may be a mess right now, but why would anybody in their right mind move to Threads?

Taking advantage of the recent chaos at Twitter that is getting many of its users completely confused or upset, Meta looks set to launch Threads, a clone of the microblogging network, on July 6. Initially it would draw on Instagram’s user base —a trick which has worked before, given that perceptions of Instagram are marginally less negative than Facebook’s. Threads will look like a Twitter’s literal copycat, and would try to ramp up initial critical mass by generating a massive opening of accounts from Instagram so that users would likely find their friends there, thus exploiting the network effect.

So far, so good: Elon Musk’s purge at Twitter is encouraging competitors. His goal is to transform the corporate culture and how people use it, which among other things, means reducing its size in order to hold on to loyal users, using them as a base from which to rebuild Twitter with a new set of value propositions. The strategy could backfire, but Musk seems determined to see it through. So for the time being, whether the changes are definitive, temporary or due to a total lack of control, for the time being, using Twitter will be an extreme sport.

In the meantime, the likes of Mastodon, Bluesky, Spill and others are attracting record numbers of users or requests to…