Two separate data analysis firms say the Twitter killer from Instagram has unraveled even as Meta has rushed to add highly requested features.
  • jcrabapple
    20•2 years ago

    This is what happens when you launch with no content discovery features, so you have to whore yourself out and follow anyone and everyone if you want to get any attention. “Content creators” and clout chasers are the primary customer of this service, so without that I don’t know why they’d want to use it.

    • @[email protected]English
      5•2 years ago

      “Minimum Viable Product” has been a curse on the industry for so long. This is the clearest example of its failure

      • jcrabapple
        1•2 years ago

        No hashtags, no full text search. Just an algorithmic feed and a following feed, and you can only search users.

        • Nyla Smokeyface
          1•2 years ago

          That’s…really bad 😭 Even Mastodon allows you to search by hashtags (I know it supports full-text search but most instances turn that off because it’s pricey)

          • jcrabapple
            1•2 years ago

            Actually I only pay $20/month for a hosted opensearch server for my Mastodon instance. I think a lot of people on Mastodon are against full text search for ideological reasons.

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    27•2 years ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Similarweb, a digital intelligence platform, shared its data with Gizmodo showing Threads daily active users hovered around 49 million just two days after launch.

    David Carr, a senior insights manager at the analysis company, told us the engagement time based on just U.S. user data was slightly more favorable to Threads, but not by much.

    Back during its 15 minutes of fame, Threads was leveraged as the fastest-growing platform in the history of apps, hitting 100 million user signups less than a week after launch.

    Instagram head Amad Mosseri has also mentioned their intent to connect Threads to the decentralized Fediverse, though whether that drives new-found interest in the app is anyone’s guess.

    It was clear from Thread’s launch that users were desperate for a Twitter alternative away from owner Elon Musk’s unending march toward making the platform a pay-to-play hellscape.

    A big problem with the app was that it simply didn’t include features found in its main competitors, and the company spent years playing catch up, but all in vain.

    I’m a bot and I’m open source!

        • Lemmington Bunnie
          2•2 years ago

          You can switch to use the external browser in the app settings, however, at time it affects everything - including images. Once that’s fixed, I’ll probably move back from Sync to Connect!

    • ɔiƚoxɘup
      2•2 years ago

      Could be the trough of dissolutionment or the trough of oblivion from which there is no return. Probably too early to tell.

  • Altima NEOEnglish
    16•2 years ago

    Ive been hearing the same headline for two weeks now

  • @[email protected]English
    98•2 years ago

    Since it already worked with instagram, this was people signing in with their instagram account, checking the app once or twice, and then going back to instagram. The starting numbers where incredibly manipulated because of this single account system between threads and instagram.

    • @[email protected]English
      8•2 years ago

      I saw a lot of people excited to try it. Losing 80% of its peak users at this point doesn’t seem like a failure to me. Anybody who was curious was counted as a user. I’m sure fediverse sites have had similar, smaller influxes of new users that create an account to check it out and then don’t come back. It takes some determination to move to another social networking ecosystem.

  • @[email protected]
    31•2 years ago

    damn, reading the data collected from the Play Store made me finally delete my instagram account. the damn app is a free farm of data. fuck zuck

  • Ertebolle
    15•2 years ago

    It’s just companies and influencers, nobody else is posting much there. And half of the influencers are only there to try to get you to follow them somewhere else. (feed is absolutely crammed with Taylor “not wearing a mask outdoors in 2023 is literally genocide” Lorenz hawking her new YouTube channel and I don’t even follow her)

    Meanwhile Mastodon continues growing steadily, and I’m getting as much engagement there as I ever did on Twitter with maybe 10% as many followers.

    • BiggestBulb
      3•2 years ago

      My one big gripe with Mastadon is that images take absolutely forever to load if they have even a marginal amount of pixels. I scroll art often and I’m left waiting for greater than a minute for these things to load (and I’m on a very, very fast connection).

      • @[email protected]
        4•2 years ago

        Talk to your instance admin for that. Mastodon caches remote images and serves it from the local server to local users, so it should be fast unless the admin has something broken or configured wrong.

  • @[email protected]
    7•2 years ago

    They should have implemented activity pub support from day 1. They rushed the roll out because they wanted to make us of Twitter’s (one of many) fuck ups but failed to keep users.

  • @[email protected]
    12•2 years ago

    Honestly not that big of a deal. When something is hyped up users who either didn’t or barely used Twitter (X) probably joined in. It boosted their initial numbers but again they fell off. They’ll grow as unique content grows. That happens with everything, as will the case be with Lemmy. Growth isn’t linear.

    • @[email protected]
      2•2 years ago

      I suppose it isn’t linear but I suspect going from massive insane explosion in numbers to an 80% loss in a matter of weeks is pretty unusual. I think that growth was largely driven not by hype but by the automatic linking with other Zuckernedia properties.