The new Twitter killer will have Zuckerberg in stitches
I’ve struggled for the words to describe how badly Elon Musk has fumbled the bag with Twitter. Today, I think I’ve found them — It’s gone so poorly that people are excited to join something created by Mark Zuckerberg.
Meta’s Twitter clone, Threads, is officially out in the wild. I’ve played around with the app for a few hours and, honestly, it’s pretty slick. The design is clean, and there are some nice little features, like following people directly from the main feed. There’s a character limit of 500. Thank god for that. On the downside, the homepage is filled with algorithmically-recommended posts from around the network rather than your network. It’s all very Meta. I also had to sign up for an Instagram account — which I can’t say I’m thrilled about — but for those who already have one, signing up is as simple as it gets. It also brings your Instagram audience across. That’s a huge pull. Nobody likes starting from zero.
Being an almost identical copy, everything you’d expect to be here is here; likes, replies, retweets (reposts), the navigation bar at the bottom and verified ticks, organized in the same scrolling feed. In terms of innovation, it gets a big fat 0/10. I’ve previously berated Meta’s lack of innovation and reliance on copying a competitor’s features. On the whole, it’s been a failing strategy. I’ve even written as much when writing about the then-called Project 92, saying,
Will Meta’s version of Twitter come to fruition? Probably. Meta has enough resources to pursue it. Will it work? Probably not, unless Twitter completely folds and the door swings open for someone to suck up the market.
But I think I was wrong with that judgment. The decision to clone is smart because it has eliminated almost all the friction. Users of Twitter will feel immediately at home, and with their audience already there with them (if they’d built one on Instagram), the transition will be seamless. The transitions to alternatives like Mastodon and Bluesky are cumbersome, and the experience is less familiar once you’re there. That has stemmed the exodus. Mastodon’s monthly active users flatlined around 2.5 million, while Bluesky only has around 180,000 (with a waitlist of around 2 million).