Boom of followers on Threads but the challenge with Twitter ends in a draw

Zuck and Musk don’t love each other but they look a lot alike. The first day of Threads, the anti-Twitter app launched yesterday by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg against rival Elon Musk, essentially ended in a draw. An Italian draw, one of those where everyone won. He would have won Meta because in just four hours he surpassed five million users. “Ten million people registered in seven hours,” tweeted the patron of Meta on Twitter, just to annoy his competitor. But the founder of Tesla also won because, as often happens on social networks, migrations, when they exist, are slow, very slow.

The duel of the past

Also for this reason, the one between Meta and Twitter risks being a duel of the past. The real emerging social network is called TikTok but it plays in a separate league. He has filled up with teenagers and Millennials but has very little social media. He looks at you with your thumb but you interact little, very little. Twitter is the past, it remains a place where basically people write, read and argue. A textual social network loved by politicians, showbiz stars, athletes and intellectuals, which is often used in a compulsive and toxic way but remains the only platform where to find news, statements and comments of public relevance. Journalists like him but he has never seduced advertisers and sponsors. And in fact for years it has been in strong and apparently inexorable decline.

The decline of Twitter

Especially since Elon Musk bought it and turned it over with the aim of relaunching it. Relaunch that didn’t exist. The paid blue ticks have not worked for now, in fact they have alienated some VIPs. Then the layoffs of the staff, the numerous about-faces and finally the decision on Friday to block access to reading tweets for surfers who are not ‘logged in’, i.e. without access, with the motivation of countering the “high levels of manipulation of the system and of data scraping”. The limits set for verified accounts a maximum of 6,000 posts to read per day, while for unverified accounts the threshold drops to 600 posts per day, reaching 300 posts for new unverified accounts. We use the verb in the imperfect because just yesterday Musk retraced his steps. Perhaps to curb the flight of users he changed his mind for the umpteenth time. As the Engadget website states, one of the reasons could also be that, following the recent changes, Google has stopped indexing, among the search results, the links that refer to Twitter. The Search Engine Land portal has estimated a 62% drop in indexed content, with a consequent drop in the service’s advertising revenue.

The end of social networks

The truth, however, is that Zuck’s choice to launch Threads is not just to take advantage of his rival’s weakness. It is also the symptom of the end of the social media era as we have known it. As David Pierce wrote in The Verge, the rise of artificial intelligence has sent all social networks into a tailspin. Big language models from companies like OpenAI and Google are built on data gathered from the open web. It means that while before publishing everything and making it accessible meant increasing followers, visibility and capturing advertising, now this data can be monetized and sold to those who train Ai algorithms by trade. In short, it was understood that money is not made by putting people in contact but by returning to entertainment. As Pearce writes, “the ‘social media’ age is giving way to the ‘media with a comments section’ age. In this scenario Threads appears particularly interesting.

What’s New in Threads

Twitter’s new rival platform looks like the text version of Instagram. It will integrate with ActivityPub, which is an open and decentralized social networking protocol. This will theoretically allow users of the new app to bring their accounts and followers with them to other apps that support ActivityPub, including Mastodon. As explained on their blog: People using compatible apps will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads account and vice versa, ushering in a new era of diverse and interconnected networks. It means creating a place where we don’t have to live within a company business model. In the long run what is called Fediverse is a good idea and would change how social media works. But for now it doesn’t exist.