Unravelling Threads

With so many social media platforms to choose from, it can be hard to tell which (if any), you should be investing any time into either personally or professionally. Metropol’s tech guru Ian Knott takes a look at ‘Threads’ – Meta’s answer to Twitter.

As the band Weezer once sang, “If you want to destroy my sweater, hold this thread as I walk away.” While Weezer obviously weren’t referencing social media back in 1994, if you’ve been ‘sweating’ on whether you should be downloading Threads, here’s a few things you need to know.

The demise of Twitter has been well publicised, starting with Elon Musk’s takeover, employee “purge”, negative publicity, and monetisation of verified accounts.

While Twitter certainly isn’t dead by any means, users left in their droves presenting an opportunity for a piece of software to take its place. A platform called Mastodon was largely touted to take up the mantle, but a clunky, convoluted interface soon forced it out of contention.

So who better to take up the challenge than Meta – a company that already dominates the social sphere (Facebook & Instagram) – with its “Twitter clone” (I’ll touch on this later), named Threads.

Threads is not a new term in online messaging, harking back to the Bulletin Boards and online hangouts of the 90s.

It does serve the purpose nicely, and is already in many people’s online-vernacular.

Threads has amassed the fastest user-base in history, with 30 million users in the first 24 hours, and surpassing 100M a few days later (and at the time of writing, it’s still not available in the EU).

While that sounds impressive, it’s worth noting that Threads is closely tied to Instagram, which already has a massive user-base. You simply log in using your Instagram details and it already knows your contacts and followers for you to instantly connect to. You don’t need to do too much work to build up your audience.

Meta have chosen the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to Threads, and I don’t think anyone can put their hand on heart and deny the interface similarities to Twitter, despite impending lawsuits.

There are distinct differences however. Threads allows a 500 character limit (280 for Twitter), and videos five minutes in length (two minutes and 20 seconds for Twitter).

There is no doubt the hype around Threads will settle down, and the number of active users will drop off significantly. After all, Twitter was already the domain of the truly dedicated before Musk took over.

But there are so many ways to communicate digitally either publically or personally. You won’t find many under-25s using Facebook or Twitter, and are only on Threads because of Instagram and ’FOMO’. Let’s not forget Snapchat, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, YouTube, Discord, Reddit, Pinterest, the list goes on. Even MySpace is still a thing. Yes, MySpace.

So don’t stress, choose what’s right for you and yours. If I can leave you with a new take on Weezer’s lyrics… “Take these Threads, or walk away.”