, to that of a bar where the bartender has to eject the last swaying patrons. Threads, by contrast, was bright and new, like high school on the first day of class. Meta seemed to have encouraged celebrities and influencers to pre-stock the feed with aggressively enthusiastic posts. Users entered into the midst of a raucous party.
In a matter of days, Threads gained more than seventy million users, according to Meta, making it one of the fastest-growing apps ever. Of course, it piggybacked on Meta’s preëxisting billions of users. The only way to sign up for the social network is with an Instagram account, and this generates a ready-made list of followers and followed accounts. The experience of using Threads is a bit like being on Instagram if it suddenly prioritized snippets of text over images.
What once made Twitter successful was its steadfast commitment to real-time information. It was a free-for-all shout fest of journalists, newsmakers, and creators, and anyone else could join the din on a relatively equal footing. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, posted on Threads that the app would not “encourage” news, as Twitter once did: “There are more than enough amazing communities—sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment, etc.
Thus, the extremely online are left wandering aimlessly, trading invitations like speakeasy passwords, hoping to break into the next happening spot before it gets too crowded. Picnic is a social network popular with Gen Z where users exchange frenetic homemade videos and animations on themes such as anime and Roblox. Bluesky, a Twitter clone supported by the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, which is in private beta, might have the most coherent identity.
The past few days I’ve been bouncing between Twitter, Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, and TikTok. It’s hard to remember where precisely I posted something. Likewise, I notice that the accounts I’m following post slight variations of the sameon each platform. It feels, above all, like an exhausting waste of time.