From the Editor’s Desk for Monday: We Don’t Need Another Hero (Premium)

As you may have seen, Meta last week released Threads, which is logically described as yet another Twitter replacement. But Threads is different from previous attempts to duplicate what is---or used to be---great about Twitter because it's made by the most dominant social media company on earth and had rocketed to an incredible 70 million sign-ups in just its first two days. (It's surpassed 100 million since then.)

Like many, I have mixed feelings about Threads. On a personal level, Twitter has always worked well for me, and until recently I’d not been subjected to the racism, hate speech, and alt-right nonsense that others complain about. But I also don’t like to see the dominant get even more dominant: I view Facebook as a stolen product and consider its Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions to be nothing short of a regulatory failure. Meta’s core products have all long ago fallen prey to enshittification, just as surely as Twitter has under Elon Musk.

I also look at these products and services through a professional lens, however. And on that note, there is Twitter and then there is everything else. Twitter is by far my most important social media platform, as I have over 125,000 followers on the service, far more than all of the other services I use professionally combined. Trying to recreate that kind of following on another service is daunting, and with would-be alternatives like Mastodon still comparatively tiny, it’s probably impossible.

But the rapid rise of Threads, whose success is owed to Meta cannily leveraging its 2+ billion active Instagram users, is enticing. With the understanding that sign-ups are not the same as active users, and with the caveat that Threads is today feature-incomplete, it’s not hard to imagine this service quickly catapulting into the 100s of millions of active users range, and perhaps even into the billions. Put simply, I cannot (professionally) afford to ignore this. And so I’ve taken the first steps towards establishing what is now an empty presence on Threads, and I will auto-post article links there (as I do to Twitter and Mastodon, and other services) as soon as the service I use supports it.

The dark horse here is whether I can shift my Twitter usage to Threads. And that’s a big deal for me because my Twitter presence isn’t just about auto-posting links to articles. I’m quite active on Twitter, I tweet throughout the day, and I often mock-cover big Apple, Google, and Microsoft events in real-time on the service. For so many reasons, I can’t just pick up and move. I use Twitter as it was originally conceived, as a sort of town hall, a place to have conversations with others, most of whom (I assume) share my love of personal technology. It’s not where I go to post pictures from trips or interact with my friends and family.

No, I do those things from two Meta-owned services, Instagram and Facebook, respectively. And that, of course, is what’s troubling about Threads. Do I really want to...