Meta Launches Threads via the Instagram Social Graph

I have joined Threads.

The onboarding process is great, you can basically pull over all your Instagram bio information, then auto-follow all your follows on there, then you get a few notes about the product which includes a threat about the Fediverse and a Mastodon mention.

After that, it’s a pretty stripped-down Twitter clone.

Feel like they really dropped the ball actually integrating Instagram content into the launch, would be cool to have those images to thread on. Substack Notes did it at launch (I realize the scale of launch is probably massively different for Threads).

I have not been interested in Twitter since the new owner announced the acquisition, but I can’t believe how badly the tenure has gone. Blue Sky, Mastodon, Threads — they could all fail. Microblogging could die itself by a thousand cuts that fracture the dialog into a chase.

The microblogging advertising budget is up for grabs. What analytics could Twitter integrate into their update that would make that feature more insightfully valuable for you?

Right now everyone is excited for the launch but tomorrow social media strategies will have to address this new entrant and there’s a lot of exploring to do. For example, right now Medium is pulling metadata, but Substack is not yet. It isn’t a pretty embed but it did work.

That’s to say, you can copy the URL to a post and drop it into a browser. However, you cannot apparently log into the network via the browser at present.

I will say that it was brilliant to launch Threads at the end of the business day so everyone can play with it for the rest of the evening. Rough for the Euro folks staying up late or getting up particularly early to check it out.

However, the appeal of Threads cannot only be the Instagram social graph set against the Twitter UI (maybe it can though…we’ll see!). I would like to see an exclusive feature on the platform or an expanded feature set for folks that would like to integrate accounts.

The Fediverse

I want to call out this particular point about the fediverse: it seems we have multiple federated protocols in simultaneous operation with Mastodon & Blue Sky. This new situation is making me curious. How many federated networks are sustainable or desirable? Moreover, who will launch the second Threads node? Could we see a standard social network transfer protocol emerge?

I realize the early-stage Blue Sky custom domain is the half step to proper federated nodes in the future and that Threads could take this same approach. In a sense, this gives organizations a social network that can launch social networks.

Connect with me on Threads if we haven’t yet.