ActivityPub with Threads: Towards a Balance of Public Conversation and Visual Sharing in a Social Media Protocol, like Twitter?

ActivityPub is a social media protocol that powers Mastodon. It is not ready at the time of launch, as I previously reported. When it is enabled, Threads users will be able to interact with Mastodon users and take their accounts to other clients that support the ActivityPub standard.

Well, a couple of different things. The idea at a high level is we have this amazing creative community on Instagram. There are amazing creators on the platform. Obviously, Twitter pioneered the space, and there are a lot of good offerings out there for public conversations, but just given everything that was going on, we thought there was an opportunity to build something that was open and something that was good for the community that was already using Instagram.

My hope with this, with Threads — which I am telling you is very risky, but I am also telling you I’m more excited about this than I have been about any of the other projects — is that it’s the right balance. We have a community that is interested. You can use Threads to post your identity from social media. You can bring your accounts with you to Threads. The two apps are interconnected and can promote each other and help each other. I am hoping it is the right balance of public conversation and visual sharing since it is a different use case. We will see.

And so we wanted to see what that might look like. Is it a tab in the app? Is it bringing text to feed? Is it a separate app? A bunch of different people [inside Meta] were playing in this space, as you can imagine. You’ve got a lot of sources, I know. I am pretty sure that you heard a lot of different things. People all over the company were playing. What we tried to do is pull everything together into a more focused effort so that instead of building a bunch of things not that well, we could try to place a meaningful, risky, but compelling bet together. It all came together in the late winter.

Was there anything specific with how Elon Musk is handling Twitter that led you all to move now? There are a lot of things one could point to, I think.

I think it’d be a mistake to underestimate both Twitter and Elon. It has a strong community on it and a lot of history. The network effects are incredibly strong. A bunch of advertisers pulling their budgets doesn’t necessarily affect the network engagement at all; in fact, it might even help and not hurt over the long run.

I want to be clear: any time you build a new app from scratch, it is much less likely to succeed than to succeed. This is riskier than ever, but it seemed like the landscape was changing. People were interested in having alternative options to have public conversations. It’s not just us playing in the space in addition to Twitter, obviously. And we have this really strong, vibrant creator community. So it just seemed worth at least putting a small team together to explore some ideas. When we had a design and direction we were excited about, we decided to take a swing and see what happened.

It was a hugely contentious debate internally. You could be in feed. You could be a separate tab. You could be a separate app. The post and comments model does not support public discourse, as well as the model that has been pioneered by TWo and replies. Treating replies as equal as opposed to subordinate somehow just allows for a very different and much more broad range of public conversations. People do post text to Instagram all the time, even though we don’t support it first class, and we’re experimenting with that, too. I think it solved a smaller use case than public discourse.

There are two separate tabs, one for the app and one for the tab. Separate tab is tough. There is only so much that can be put in the app. It’s already feeling too complicated. We’re trying to actually simplify right now, and so it’s certainly working against that. And generally, when you build a separate tab, you find you want to push all that distribution through a feed invariably in order to bootstrap it. You kind of end up right back in that first problem.

They are a good example. Creators are becoming more and more savvy. They’re using more and more platforms. It’s becoming rarer that a creator is completely attached to one platform because they’re always worried about the risk of being overly beholden to one company that they obviously can’t control. I think that this is the direction of travel, and that a new app can give us the opportunity to step into this space. It would be very, very difficult to take an existing app like Instagram and then integrate it.

So, higher beta. More reward, more risk. If we are going to evolve forward as a company, we should always be using high-risk bets like this and other things that aren’t going to work.

Is Facebook a stand alone app? The case for ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the Future of Open Collaboration and Social Media

I think the irony of naming this a stand alone app that you all shut down two years before is lost on you.

If we’re going to build a separate app, it makes no sense to do it if you’re only going to do it for six months or a year. You have to give it a real run. You have to assume that out of the beginning you get things wrong and that you don’t succeed.

There are a few new apps I have been involved in over the years. I think the mistake we made was to build something that was too much like Facebook. It was just a different version of Facebook. So why would you even do it? The same content was used in both Facebook Home and Facebook. The content was the same and the design was different. We pivoted too far away from that. We overcorrected towards things that didn’t seem to fit in with our strategic strengths. We were building different apps.

The ActivityPub element of this I’m fascinated by. The plan was recently integrated with that, so expect that in a few months. It’s not happening on day one. Why not do that at launch, and why are you doing that at all?

Let’s start with why we are doing it at all. I do think that more and more people are going to be interested in and appreciate more open systems. I believe that is the direction of travel for the industry. It is going to be a difficult shift for a lot of the larger platforms. But as people become more and more savvy about the benefits and the risks involved with using any of these platforms, then I think they’re going to be demanding more.

We get a lot of feedback on how we integrate with ActivityPub and the Mastodon networks so this allows us to learn. I have learned a lot from talking to people. This is us leaning into where I think the world is going. And also, it has some really kind of nice benefits. I think the average creator today on Instagram probably doesn’t know what Mastodon or ActivityPub is and probably doesn’t need to. But when you start to think through the logical implications, or at least the opportunities of integrating fully over the long run, I think some pretty interesting opportunities arise.

I think the one you should own your audience is the one that makes you the most popular with creators. If you decide to leave Threads one day, you should be able to bring your audience with you. I talked about this idea in different ways. There are, I think, better ways to do this over the long run, but I do think ActivityPub allows you to support that. I think we might be a more compelling platform for creators, particularly for the newer creators who are more and more savvy, if we are a place where you don’t have to feel like you have to trust us forever or you can build up an audience, and then you can bring that audience with you elsewhere if you really have to at the end of the day.

That’s just one example of a benefit. I think there will be more over time. It’s a combination of trying to lean into where the world is going, trying to empower creators, and also trying to learn and be honest and humble about the fact that we [Meta] come from a very different phase of the internet. We know that we need to evolve, or else we run the risk of becoming irrelevant. Let’s be open minded and try some new things, learn and adapt.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23784870/instagram-threads-adam-mosseri-interview-twitter-competitor

The Dam Mosseri Interview on Twitter: How Do We Identify Users in the Threads App? And How Do You Organize Your Threads?

We didn’t have time to do anything. It requires a bunch more work. Think about everything we have to do. Like, if you’re building safety classifiers, you need to be able to run those classifiers on datasets that aren’t our typical datasets, right? If you’re following accounts on other servers in the Threads app, how do we classify that content? There are a lot of engineering jobs there. How do reporting flows work? How does strikes with accounts work? How does ranking work?

We knew it was going to slow us down. We were hoping to launch with support. We went to a point where I was like, “Look, we need to go because our window is going to close otherwise.” And we just have to fast follow with this as quickly as we can. It is a while later if that is the case. And that’s unfortunate. But at some point, I think timing is everything. I didn’t want us to miss our window entirely.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23784870/instagram-threads-adam-mosseri-interview-twitter-competitor

Tweets from Twitter: What Do We Need? How Do We Decide What We Do? Why We Don’t Want to Do AnyDMs?

To start, we don’t want to do any DMs. I think people in the US have a little bit of inbox fatigue with that decision, I don’t know if it’s going to last as a decision. We all have a lot of different inboxes that we manage. What do you use to find your sources? Signal?

It’s absolutely true. There is an electronic message service, called iMessage. There are a lot of people that use Facebook Messenger on Android in the US. There is obviously Instagram DMs, which has been really on fire lately. I live in Europe where everyone uses the messaging app on their phone.

The idea was to lean into openness, to allow people to share threads on other DM networks. It could happen anywhere if it happened on IG. And we’ll see if that is sufficient. Maybe it is not for a modern social network. And if it is, we get to avoid further fragmenting the space, and we get the benefit of allowing people to raise awareness of threads on any network, which could be good as we try to bootstrap it out from nothing.

There is a reason that threads are not available in the European Union. That seems like a huge missed market opportunity. Is that due to uncertainty about the Digital Markets Act?

The complexities with complying with some of the laws coming into effect next year are significant. We don’t want to launch anything that isn’t compatible with what we know and what we think is coming It’s just going to take longer to make sure not only that it’s compliant but that any claims we make about how we’ve implemented compliance stand up to our very high set of documentation and testing centers internally.

I am pretty sure that I am bummed about it. I’ve lived outside of the US for a year. I’m pushing teams inside Meta to stop leaving things unfinished and get them out to the rest of the world. I meet creators who are asking questions like, “Do I need to move to the US to get access to such and such feature?” And it breaks my heart. But this one is just going to take a bunch of time.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23784870/instagram-threads-adam-mosseri-interview-twitter-competitor

Instagramgram and Twitter: Creating a vibrant community of creators and growing culturally relevant societal value: a conversation with Adam Mosseri

If we make something that lots of people love and keep using, we will be able to make money from it. And I would be confident that the business model will be ads. Right now, we are not focused on monetization. We are focused on making something people love to use. That will be a problem if we get something to scale.

I don’t think so. I think time shows that there is room for more than one person in a room. There are definitely network effects, and there are definitely competitive effects. But I think you look at a lot of countries around the world, and there’s a couple of major players in the social space between messaging and stories and feeds and in any combinations thereof. Brazil is a really good example. There is a huge increase in the number of people usingInstagram and the number of people usingWhatsApp in Brazil. And they both continue to grow really rapidly over the last couple of years, despite the fact that they’re both huge.

I think Twitter will continue to exist. Success will be creating a vibrant community particularly of creators, because I think this sort of public space is a place where a small group of people produce most of the content that most everyone consumes. So I think it’s really about creators more than it is about average folks who I think are much more there just to be entertained.

I think [we want] a vibrant community of creators that’s really culturally relevant. It would be great if it gets really, really big, but I’m actually more interested in if it becomes culturally relevant and if it gets hundreds of millions of users. But we’ll see how it goes over the next couple of months or probably couple of years.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23784870/instagram-threads-adam-mosseri-interview-twitter-competitor

Comments on the Meta/Trees Public Conversations Challenge and Musk’s Unpredictability Under the Elon Musk Era & Their Implications

A lot of celebrities from Hollywood, music, professional sports, business, and the like have joined Meta ahead of the public release of Threads. The app has seen celebrities such as Karlie Kloss, Tony Robbins, Dana White, Gordon Ramsay, Jack Black, Russell Wilson, and Anitta.

There also isn’t a paid verification scheme that unlocks additional functionality, though Instagram’s blue checks will port over to Threads accounts. With some exceptions for extreme cases like the sharing of child exploitation imagery, moderation actions Meta takes against a Threads account will not impact its associated Instagram account, according to internal documents I’ve seen.

After the platform is running smoothly and on a path to one billion people, the switch to monetization will be made, according to Facebook’s founder and CEO.

Since Threads is a new app and people have to download one, it is a risky endeavor. Meta has made the onboarding process easier by letting you auto-populate your account info and follow list from your Instagram, which I was able to do quickly after being granted access to Threads earlier today.

“Obviously, Twitter pioneered the space,” according to Mosseri. There are many good offerings for public conversations. We thought there was an opportunity to build something open and good for the community that had already started using it, and that was something we wanted to do.

Meta has a new competitor in Threads, it is based on Instagram’s account system. According to the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, Twitter’s “volatility” and “unpredictability” under Musk provided the opening to compete. In an interview, Mosseri says that Threads is designed for “public conversations,” a direct reference to how Twitter execs have described the purpose of the service over the years.

The hierarchy of text-based social media platforms started looking shaky as soon as Elon Musk took over Twitter last year, and it’s only grown more unstable as he continues rolling out abrupt and unpopular changes on the platform.

Twitter Users vs. Facebook Users: The User-Aware Meta App Launching Twitter_Twitter_ZakZerberg

The buttons are there to like, reply or quote a thread. The number of likes and replies on each post is displayed below its content. Accounts can be public or private.

Meta has more than 3 billion users across its stable of apps, and it is making it easier for existing users to start a new account.

After downloading the new app, existing Instagram users have the option of importing standard set-up functions, including their bio, username, profile photo and follow list.

More than 30 million people have joined the app by midday Tuesday, which is 30 times the number of people that are active on Mastodon and Post.

Celebrity users include chef Gordan Ramsay, actor and singer Zac Efron and more. Brands like Airbnb, Netflix, Marvel Studios and Spotify were using Threads, as were news outlets like CBS, Vox and Vogue.

Twitter doesn’t offer regular disclosures of its user numbers, especially since news broke in 2017 that it had long been over-reporting its monthly active user count. Around that time period, the company had about 327 million monthly users.

The owner of Meta could have easily launched Threads around that time. He tried to buyTwitter but it wouldn’t sell.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/06/1186191438/threads-twitter-instagram-musk-zuckerberg

The Making of Threads: How Much Does Facebook and Instagram Make Sense of it? Commentary on Musk’s Twitter rants about the Threads launch

Musk announced a temporary cap on non-paying users being able to see a lot of the stuff on his account. It was immediately reversed that it was impossible to see a retweet unless a user was signed into the platform.

Even after months of turmoil, each new policy change sparks a wave of tweets about leaving the platform, all at a time when advertising spending has cratered at Twitter, dropping nearly 60% from a year ago.

Musk referred to his sister app,Instagram, as a “weak sauce,” when asked by NPR if he had anything to say about the Threads launch.

He wrote in a Thursday tweet that it was infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers than to be happy on social media.

The app’s financial stability is also in question. Tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs as the technology industry is slowing down and the Metaverse venture by Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg continues to invest billions in virtual reality.

Threads says it’s aiming to have the app work in the so-called “fediverse,” the federated universe of apps that share similar communication rules. This might be especially appealing to creators or those with a large following who are hesitant to start over on a new platform.

But in the end, the element that might make or break Threads could be outside it’s control: whether its users build it into the culture they’re craving.

In some of his earliest missives on the platform, Zuckerberg said he was focused on making Threads “a friendly place,” adding that that would “ultimately be the key to its success.”

Tech junkies might counter that Zuckerberg has played (and lost) this game before. He tried to replicate the ephemerality of Snapchat with Facebook’s Stories feature, or the compulsive scroll of TikTok with Instagram’s Reels. Neither feature successfully bested out the competition.

One of the biggest weaknesses of the app is that it is difficult to establish a habit of posting on Threads and this may be the most important thing that can make the launch successful.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/06/1186191438/threads-twitter-instagram-musk-zuckerberg

The terrible uncle problem: Why people cannot find you on social media — or how to take control of what you say ‘nearly’

“The terrible uncle problem is caused when all of your family members are able to find you on social media, and your high school classmates can’t because they can’t find you on the internet,” she said. Younger people are turned off of platforms where they feel like they have to control what they say.