this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How many active user? I'm one of those people who used the app for few minutes before removing it

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

@small44, did you already have an Instagram account and get automatically signed up? Just curious if that is what they are doing to get so many users.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What they're doing is making it very easy to sign up. You just need to go to your Instagram and click a few buttons and you've created a threads account.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I know my friends posted at least something when it launched then went along with their lives like nothing happened.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Threads needs to be BANNED from lemmy and kbin and Federation whatever mindboggle NOW. FIGHT BACK!!! DESTROY THE HORRID THREADS, MUSK AND ZUCC!!!!!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Threads do not do posts. They do twits, or what is called on kbin microblogs. As such Lemmy can not be affected and kbin can only be affected in the microblog section.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

what about mastodon? last time i looked there it looked very similiar to twitter so

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yes, but reply above me was specifically about lemmy and kbin. Mastodon will be affected, unless they defederate.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The point of ActivityPub should be to become as widespread as possible so as to proliferate the standard and eliminate silos and walled gardens--including Facebook and its ilk. It would be an unambiguously good thing if Meta's (and Tumblr's) move towards interoperability cascades to the other big platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit.

You could follow (or choose not to follow) users on any platform you want, from any platform you want.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Having a single player control most of the market - like meta - means that they will have a lot of sway over how the protocol is developed. This is propably a bad thing since meta har different goals than people currently using the fediverse and also have financial incentives to get people to move over to their platforms instead.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

The problem is, walled gardens helps lock-in users. Meta and Twitter et al want lock-in. It only takes the CEO to decide they don't wanna play nicely and boom, back to walled gardens again.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (4 children)

By automatically signing up Instagram users.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think that's true. You can sign up using your Instagram account, but I don't think it happens automatically. Instagram has 1.4B active users for reference.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It creates shadow placeholder profiles. You need to "sign up" but it's more like activating your threads profile rather than making a new account since it uses the same account database as Instagram. When I joined, it let me follow all of the people I follow on Instagram, even though 95% of them didn't have a threads account. Instead it put them in a pending list, automatically following them once they sign into the app and activate their profile for the first time.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

What makes you think the shadow accounts are part of the 100M figure? The Android app alone is already in the 50M+ downloads band.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The point is that all of those 100 million people did make an active decision and take active steps to create an account. I'm not sure why Meta making the sign-up process very easy is meant to be a criticism.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And the thing is they are reporting the number of shadow accounts they create. If I were a meta investor I would be looking for a class action right about now.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think they are because if they were the number of accounts they report would be 1.4 billion and not 100 million.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You should remember that there's a lot of numbers between 0 and 1.4 billion - say, 100 million.

Why would they not pad their numbers if they cannot meaningfully be held accountable?
If padding with X users is projected to generate the most profit, then they are going to do just that.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If it's automatic shouldn't the number of user be the same as the number of Instagram user?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

When you login initially it offers to follow all your Instagram follows. Even if they've never logged in. Its creating shadow accounts for all of them.

When they login initially they find they already have a bunch of followers.

So it's not all of Instagram. It's just all the people who've tried it + all the people they tried to follow.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

So you're saying they are going out of their way to commit fraud on a scale that would trigger an SEC investigation of a publicly traded company, rather than you just making up the way something works? You do understand how you can have such placeholders not be included in the number of active users...right?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'd love a citation for that.

If it only took a single one of your followers signing up for Threads to make a "shadow account" for you, I'd imagine the number of accounts would basically be the same as the number of Instagram accounts.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I think it's more that you need to download the app to see what's going on there and there's almost no friction to sign in if you're already on Instagram. It's a deliberate FOMO play that's actually kind of brilliant and seems to be working out well.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It would be great to see how many of those users have actually stayed after using it one time.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They cannot leave threads. The only way to leave threads is to nuke your instagram account.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Might just become another Google Plus situation.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

With such a mass of users, all those people now only have one thing in common: they are consumers. That's the only point of the platform, grouping these people and feeding them ads.

The comments are merely a distraction between two ads.

This is why there is a good reason for keeping a little barrier of entry to the fediverse: this barrier is also a barrier to advertisers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm new to the whole fediverse thing, so how would you create a barrier to entry apart from individual instances not federating with instances they see as abusive?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Signing up for threads is a lot easier than it is to sign up for usual lemmy or kbin instances. If they have an Instagram account then it's already automated.

If they want to interact here they'd have to create an account for a place like this instead of being able to use their thread account. Which is probably what is meant by barrier to entry. They can't go and use their meta instance. I'm assuming they can't view content from the equivalent of their all, and would have to view it by going directly to the link. So just stuck in lurker mode.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Gotcha. I've just now seen that threads doesn't support activitypub. I thought that the entire idea was to integrate with platforms like these, but oh well what did I expect :D

Still curious to see if they actually implement it and how it's going to turn out for them.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wild that this product is getting so much attention (and so many new users), despite being so uninteresting.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

We don't like it, but it shows what these social media plattforms can have for power. They can just shit out millions of users, even if it's not the exact number in this thread, compared to a few thousands of people we managed to fill the Fediverse with.

Now, if it holds up in value and so on, how much the average user contributes is another meassure. But it's hard to deny the power of these huge plattforms to a worrying degree.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Ultimately, there's a lot of demand for basic social media that's relatively simple, unobtrusive, isn't being wielded by a megalomaniac for his culture war issue du jour, and has all the people and friends you're interested in.

Given Twitter's self-immolation, I'm not really that surprised.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I was wondering why I didn't hear about Threads. But apparently it's not available in Europe due to privacy concerns.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yup, it literally canny comply with EU GDPR requirements. Sadly, while we theorecticaly have nearly the same laws grandfathered in in the UK, they're not enforced post brexit

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Add it to the pile of the brexit benefits. Your sovereignty to use threads is intact.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Downloaded it myself and used it for about a day. Really not impressed by it at all.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not a fan of the way the feed is basically 99% accounts I don't follow

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

this is exactly the issue I had. I started muting accounts for about 30 minutes and then just gave up

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It seems like an Instagram with less users mostly.

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