Why Meta’s Threads might be a win for open internet

Meta’s Twitter clone Threads is already a success by anyone’s account. The app had 70 million sign-ups in two days according to Mark Zuckerberg’s post (yes, “post” is the preferred nomenclature and not “thread”). That’s a big number in a short amount of time for a platform not yet released in Europe and only available on smartphones.

Why is there so much hype for an app that does exactly the same thing as several apps before it, especially one launched by a man who the public likes even less than Donald Trump?

Twitter has been in terminal decline since Elon Musk took over. The billionaire has spent his time rent-seeking, insulting and undermining the “elites” — celebrities, journalists — who helped make the platform the beating heart of discourse on the internet. As a result, many users have been looking to jump ship.

Combine that desire to leave with Meta rolling out the red carpet for Twitter refugees. Threads, a primarily text-based social platform, has integrated with Instagram so that any of the latter platforms’ billion existing users can instantly create an account using their Instagram credentials in about two clicks.

Plus — and this is a big one — it also imports your social graph (which is a nerd term for the people and groups who you follow and who follow you online). So when you log in for the first time, Threads is already filled with people you’re interested in. Instant network effect. It’s also attractive to the big-time creators and brands who don’t have to try to build up an audience in a new place, which makes it an easier case to spend time and energy on than yet another Twitter alternative.

There’s a lot of reasons to be cynical about Threads. Much like every other successful product released by Meta in the past 15 years that wasn’t acquired from elsewhere, it is a shameless rip-off of another app. The platform wants to suck up a lot of your data. Its moderation guidelines are a lot more puritanical than Twitter, and have typically been used to crack down on marginalised groups. Its algorithmic feed arguably makes it less friendly for real-time coverage, something that was key to Twitter’s success. Do we really want Zuckerberg to control yet another popular app? And probably the biggest issue: the platform’s algorithmic, non-chronological system of displaying posts means that users are mostly shown banal posts from brands and big Instagram accounts.

The one reason that Threads’ success is worth rooting for is that its development bucks a trend on the internet by building something that’s more open. Threads is built on ActivityPub, which is an open web protocol like HTTP and email. While not yet operational, Meta plans to make the app compatible with other ActivityPub services like Mastodon and WordPress.

The point of that technical mumbo jumbo is to demonstrate that Threads isn’t a new little walled garden on the internet that doesn’t connect with anything else (the same cannot be said of many of Meta’s previous services). Instead, it’s something that can be built on, something that can be transformed and, since Meta has promised to let people transfer their networks to other ActivityPub services, something that can be walked away from — meaning the company needs to keep serving its users or face losing them.

The potential of Threads isn’t what it is now, but what it can be. Someone might be able to build a version of CrowdTangle, a tool used by journalists and researchers to track how social networks are used and misused (crucial to the work that this writer does) that’s become increasingly unsupported by Meta. Or its own Apollo, the popular third-party Reddit app that was shut down by its creators because it couldn’t afford to pay the fees that Reddit wanted to access its data. Threads can and deserves to get its own version of @PossumsEveryHour, a pretty self-explanatory service.

As more and more of the internet is closed off so that companies can hoard data (which on social media platforms is your data that you created), Threads going the other way should be viewed as a win for the open internet. Building on something like ActivityPub comes with headaches for the company, so we should be happy that it has made this choice.

Even if Threads doesn’t replace Twitter — my bet would be that nothing fully takes over from Twitter — at least it’s showing big tech that there is another way.

This article was first published by Crikey.