cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/560250
Different source: bgr.com/…/threads-has-lost-half-of-its-daily-acti…
That’s expected, and that’s still like 50 million people. The app is still pretty undercooked and there’s very little reason to use it over Twitter from a technical point of view.
shinjiikarus@mylem.eu 1 year ago
Not really surprising. All corporate social media follows an initial trend, which steeply drops off after the first few days/weeks. Doesn’t mean Threads is doomed or anything.
Twitter wasn’t really “popular”, especially outside the US (and Japan, if I remember correctly), no matter how much so called “journalists” amplified its content. Even the most favorable estimates (which will be completely wrong, considering how many sock puppets and bots there are on any given platform), put Twitter’s MAU at a quarter of Instagrams’, which itself isn’t even the biggest social network. This speaks volumes to how interested the general population is in a text-first social network, compared to an image centric one.
Instagram’s large user base and the exclusivity/scarcity narrative, which is customary for new social networks forever (Threads was touted as so evil, it was banned in the EU! This was definitely not meant as a cautionary tale but felt very gimmicky to me) will have helped Threads acquire a lot of curious Instagram users, who quickly lost interest in a wall of uninteresting text and returned to their algorithmically presented pictures.
I believe a lot of engagement on Twitter to be completely fake, crediting it in part to bots and in part to an outrage fueling algorithm. When a lot of famous Twitter users migrated to Mastodon a few months back, the first thing they noted has been the much lower engagement, partially due to the smaller user base, but also due to much less bots. A lot of them are still looking for a new home, but cannot get rid of the dopamine hits of a “viral” twitter post and Zucc might just have the stuff for them.
Threads will stay around and probably split or assimilate the negligible small user base of Twitter in time, while truly federated platforms like Mastodon or Lemmy will have trouble on boarding (and retaining) comparable user groups, since they are missing the outrage farming algorithm and the fake engagement.
GlowingLantern@feddit.de 1 year ago
For some people, the engagement has been similar on Mastodon, even though they only have a fraction of the followers. This might suggest that either Mastodon users are generally more engaged (they actively chose to follow and can see every post) or that Twitter follower numbers were artificially inflated.