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.
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.
I mean if you pay attention most social media inundated with influencers and companies is basically:
"Buy this, no buy this, buy this instead, spend your money here!" It even leeches into everyday conversations outside of social media.
Pay attention to how often people talk about buying things and newly released products. Hell, I've caught myself contributing to it. It's kind of gross when you realize how steeped in consumerism nearly everything has become.
Well, shareholders, employees and advertisers, wanted it to make money on the users. Even if only 5% users remain, that's still better than the current interest rates after investment fund's fees.
Facebook/Instagram users wanted to check it out, because why not, creating an account was just a couple clicks.
Everyone else... they didn't, and from the looks of it, they still don't.
Zuck wanted it, and literally nobody else. They're going to need to implement ActivityPub just so every blue checkmark on earth can launch their own social network where they are the only users.
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.
It has been sadly disabled for Beehaw at the request of admins/mods, you might want to contact them if you feel it's useful, there is some discussion about this going on in https://beehaw.org/post/6976148.
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.
You mean people aren't hopping on the join the conversation with Crisco and General Mills? Who woulda thunk! I thought for sure that would be the killer application right there.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I think there will be more activity once they add more features. It’s very bare-bones right now. I honestly like the app, though, all things considered. I hate Facebook/Meta, but it’s been a nice app to just scroll through, and there’s been enough content to use it as a time killer. They desperately need a proper search feature and a trending page, though, especially if they ever hope to fully replace Twitter. Overall, I like it more than both Mastodon and Bluesky, because discoverability is so awful on Mastodon and Bluesky doesn’t have enough users and content because they haven’t gone public yet. And I very much like the idea and structure of Mastodon much more (with it being open source and federated), but the user experience has been so bad for me, with discoverability being the worst aspect of it.
I think the main method of discovery is through your network, and through your local instance. Federated timeline tends to be chaotic, but I definitely like reading my local timeline on my regional masto instance. But I believe that was the intention on the design, no 'trending', no algorithm, just the people you follow.
Yeah, I unironically like trending sections and algorithms, at least to some degree lol I understand the downsides of them, but I enjoy things being shown to me that I'll usually enjoy seeing. The YouTube algorithm for example, despite how finicky it can be to work with as a creator, is very good as a user, in my opinion.
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.
https://www.threads.net/have a proper Desktop Client a lot of people aren't going to be very active on it, they say it is coming but they also say ActivityPub is coming.