A few weeks ago Facebook (I refuse to whitewash that company by calling it Meta) decided to blackmail European users. The deal was simple. We were coerced. “Accept to pay for Facebook or we will force you to see ads. This was a lose lose situation that the European Union is now fighting. Imagine being given this choice. If you pay you’re going to be rewarding a company that has abused us.
A few weeks ago I was completely opposed to Threads being connected and accepted by the Fediverse because I hated the idea of 100 million users flooding a social network with 10 million users. Now that threads has imploded I feel differently.
Now that Threads is the same size as the Frediverse, or at least closer to being the same size, the impact of the two joining up would be diminished.
Yesterday Facebook, discguised as meta, and Meta, disguised as Instagram launched Threads. Threads is meant to be a twitter competitor. The paradox is that Facebook has always been a twitter competitor, and this has become more evident with every iteration of both social networks. It is paradoxical that Facebook would need threads, to compete with Twitter.
Not Available in Europe Threads, at the time of writing this blog post is not available in Europe because it requires data, which brings it in breach of GDPR rules.
With the sentence “Of Twitter threads (Mice) and Blog Posts (Humans)” you’ll see that I’ve done two things. The first is that I’ve modernised a well-known book title to draw parallels with the practices of writing Twitter threads and blog posts.
People write twitter threads because they think that it’s fast, convenient, will draw an audience and it’s trendy. It keeps people within the same site. No browsing between platforms and websites.
Twitter threads and blogging are both free but whereas with one you need to click to read the continuation and it’s hard to print the other is self contained and easily shareable.
I see twitter threads, that as twitter threads are a waste of time on a conversational channel but would be ideal for a blog post. Imagine that you combine two or three tweets. That length would justify a blog post.