Can Instagram's Threads save us?

tailwinds vs. headwinds field notes

I’m always curious to see a new point of view on how we might use the Internet in the future. So when Facebook, Meta, Instagram announced Threads I signed up to give it a spin and to form a view on the tailwinds and headwinds that hint at its potential for long-term success or failure.

It has become a popular pastime of entrepreneurs recently to attempt to reinvent the public town square of the Internet. From Elon’s takeover and rapid “evolution” of Twitter to the attempts at decentralizing this kind of network we see in Blue Sky to a whole host of new entrants that make promises about how “fair” their content moderation or publisher monetization philosophies would be.

Among these Threads stands out. It doesn’t appear to be trying to change much about the core Twitter experience to start. Rather it has a very reasonable UX, not a straight clone — different enough that you know you’re in a new place.

Tailwinds

The follow-graph of Instagram and the overall distribution ability of Facebook point to an easy ability to bootstrap a new platform here. In the first day it reached 30 million sign-ups. It feels like the first day of school. Plenty of familiar faces — often people I haven’t seen in awhile — show up in my notifications and stop by and say hi. There’s a general vibe of friendliness and a lot of people looking towards what’s possible here. There aren’t any ads, nor have I run into any bots or spam accounts yet. So it has this fresh, clean feel. Once some amount of participation is established Threads could start to explore more innovative directions.

A notable innovative direction called out during onboarding indicates Threads has their eye on integration with the “fediverse”. On the Instagram Help site they state “Our vision is that Threads will enable you to communicate with people on other fediverse platforms we don’t own or control. This means that your Threads profile can follow and be followed by people using different servers on the fediverse.” I’m happy to see some experimentation from larger players who want to push toward more decentralized approaches.

Another tailwind for Threads is just the fact that they have an at-scale platform now that can run a whole different set of experiments than Twitter can at any given time. Maybe a purely algorithm-driven “TikTok for Text” experience would be fun?

Headwinds

The fundamental problems in Twitter’s product seem likely to become fundamental problems in Threads over time. How should censorship and jurisdictional compliance work on this platform (e.g. where are the lines between “free speech” and “content moderation”)? How do you handle bots and spam at scale? How do you enable a flourishing ecosystem of 3rd-party (even open source?) development and discovery around these communication hubs without putting the core business of ads at risk? Without a very new design space I’m skeptical we’re going to get radically different outcomes. Though it’s possible that some paths Twitter left under-explored could yield wins.

Future

Personally, I’m excited about more radically new design spaces supported by open source protocols like Nostr and bitcoin. But I think having a duopoly of centralized providers competing to serve the town square at scale is likely to encourage more interoperability and more openness than we’d ever get with the single Twitter monopoly we’ve lived with for the past decade-plus. So in a way Threads may save us, but not for the reasons one may think. It’s because of the competitive pressure it puts on the ecosystem of players rather than because it’s a new winning formula for an old habit.