Threads.net is the new app.net but with ads and interoperable | Hacker News Reader

Threads.net is the new app.net but with ads and interoperable

fromjason.xyz

112 pointsjayveeone89 comments

This fits into the category of plausible but entirely evidence free conjecture as far as I'm concerned. I don't need more explanation for why Zuckerberg started Threads than opportunism over Twitter's demise and their desire to mitigate the worst impacts of regulation by "open-washing" their brand.

> The biggest lie in the Fediverse is that Mastodon is too small for Meta to care about. By all accounts and reason, that's simply not true. Zuck is in this impossible position because of how often and indiscriminately he kills off start-ups. Universities have studied it.

Hm, not sure I buy this particular argument vis a vi the Fediverse. Meta's acquistions feels like they're about acquiring growing competitors they fear will overtake them.

But Threads already usurpsed the Fediverse the day it released. It doesn't realistically have to worry about the Fediverse eating its bacon.

General comments on the article: it's not an idea I considered at all, and certainly, Meta is worth viewing with as much cynicism as you can throw at it.

> Meta can swap the protocol out with something proprietary

That feels as if that would invite regulator's immediately. Why even adopt ActivityPub if they plan on dropping it? Hell, if you want a protocol nobody is using, but you could adopt with the cover of pretending that you like openness, adopt BlueSky's ATProtocol.

> That feels as if that would invite regulator's immediately. Why even adopt ActivityPub if they plan on dropping it?

Why did they adopt xmpp and then drop it?

Didn't they start with xmpp? Going from nothing to an established standard gets you going quickly, and then modifying that past the point of compatibility is a reasonable (if potentially cutthroat) business decision. Going from a custom standard to an established standard seems to signal that they actually want to embrace it, though of course doesn't rule out that they also want to extend/extinguish it later.

The internet was a different place back then.

Everyone, especially regulators, have seen on many occasions now what vendor lock-in looks like and the benefits of open standards.

tbf bluesky has a few million users using their protocol.

I don't think anyone is using their protocol, per se, because they haven't enabled federation.

oh im running a few thousand maus on their protocol. solarplex.xyz.

we don’t federate yet but that’s an easy thing to pull off.

That's my point though, you're not using the protocol if you're not federating, unless I'm missing something

There's still no way to run your own instance, is there?

edit: jinx. not very federated of them.

mentioned in ops reply but we run our own instance over at solarplex.xyz

> For the adventurous, Meta would likely provide tools, resources, and UI kits for developing bespoke threads.net apps. Thanks to Llama, Meta's open-source AI development tool, almost anyone can build their very own social media platform.

Really lost me here. To frame that llama is part of a strategic plan to enable a wider pool of developers really feels like a stretch. For one thing, access to gpt and copilot is already pretty reasonable compared to the price of GPUs. The code quality from open models is improving, but unless you already know quite a bit about programming, you’ll struggle to make something work.

Yes it does feel nonsensical to mention it, it did put me off as author in this case has no idea what he’s talking about.

He could have said that llama to openai is as activitypub endorsement is to x strategy wise - that could hold.

Copilot/etc are also sold at a loss so GPU prices are really not priced in correctly yet for end users.

Nat Friedman has tweeted that this is false.

Any reference for this? I would have guessed Copilot and Tabnine were both making money.

They are, the WSJ were speculating and people ran with it. Nat Friedman said Copilot is profitable: https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1712140497127342404

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827955

Wow, I hope MS doesn't end up making it worse to keep the same pricing. I mean open source models and other closed competitors are both catching up at incredible speeds, but for now Copilot is extremely convenient and I'd pay 2x if the price were to increase to keep the same quality or to increase it.

(founder building a content monetization layer for creators on decentralized protocols here)

i’ve been thinking about this for a few years now. my two cents.

ad models stop scaling with the gorwth of decentralized social protocols because no centralized entity exists to coordinate their delivery. inventory, algorithms, personalization, or even the chrome where these ads are served.

the economics are also bad. byte dance makes 50b$ plus every year but their creator fund is 200mm. spotify paid snoop dog 40k for 1B streams.

the main way to make money (and my bet) will be enabling creators to connect / monetize / build community directly with their audience rather than get disintermediated by the likes of meta and tiktok.

these will likely need to happen on different app views (web/mobile) for different nodes.

activity pub has very poor support to coordinate something at scale and build in a consistent way - something i think @atproto does very well.

i imagine meta has decided to answer the question of how to serve ads in an increasingly decentralized world and still be in control - but this may be harder than anyone thinks?

> The main way to make money (and my bet) will be enabling creators to connect / monetize / build community directly with their audience rather than get disintermediated by the likes of meta and tiktok.

Do artists actually want that? It sounds interesting in theory but how much time do they want to spend on their art vs monetizing their fans?

Something similar is happening in book publishing where authors are getting deals that have less up front and higher revenue share. On the one hand, if there’s a breakout success then they make more money, but on the other they’re now forced to focus a lot more on monetization than the craft.

There are positives to the traditional publisher model. Maybe this is still better, I don’t know, but there are certainly tradeoffs

As an art enthusiast, I don’t want this at all. Why? A system like this drastically changes incentives, this tends to negatively affect the consumer.

I expect any social media that adopts this paradigm to be immediately overwhelmed by the crypto/nft crowd and that will immediately push away most everyone else. Reddits attempt did exactly this.

I think they do if it means more, and more reliable funding. see patreon and in video ad content. artists and creators are already having to fund directly,

this. i’ve spoken to 206 creators - comic book artists, movie makers, video artist, digital artists, music makers.

on an nps score:

- building relationship with their audience - 9/10 - monetizing their audience through the same channel - 7.5-8/10

I think for most artists it's less about monetizing their fans and more about being able to make an income doing their art versus being forced to make an income doing something else. Focusing on the craft is what brings monetization.

Traditional publisher models if anything tend to encourage the cynical cash-grabbing algorithm chasing grift people worry about, and take too much of the artists' revenue and rights for themselves. Because of course the business of helping artists monetize is to capture as much of that monetization for yourself as possible.

Being able to pay artists directly seems like the best possible solution, but that doesn't require a business or middleman like OP. Someone can build a community and link their work to their Patreon or Kofi or something else organically.

the biggest challenge with patreon and kofi is that they control the content, its monetization and its distribution.

creators also want a way to have more fun ways for their audience to engage with them around their content that RECOGNIZES the top fans in a reasonable way.

> spotify paid snoop dog 40k for 1B streams.

Poor example. If I remember correctly it was a song he had a feature on and there were about a dozen people credited on the track.

As someone who works in the music industry, this Snoop Dogg streaming thing is an obvious straw man. I genuinely hope people stop using it as evidence of, well, anything.

For that low of a payout on 1 billion streams, you'd have to (as you said) have a lot of people on your split sheet so your royalty percentage is very low or have a terrible deal on percentage with your label, distributor, or both.

Snoop Dogg isn't living off Bic lighter endorsements. He definitely makes a lot of money on music.

What happened to making content for shits and giggles without any profit incentive?

stagnant wages and layoffs

I think we saw the obvious conclusion to the idea of "finacializing an audience" in 2021-2022. There were SO many of these. Founders realized that the market for creators who want to do this != 100% of creators (i.e. mrbeast, Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift all have other, more sustainable, ways to monetize their audience).

I felt like the decentralized/crypto space sped run the non-profit world in that you have a lot of people who care about you and would love to "donate" to you, but after a few times they run out of "support a cause I care about" money, meaning you have to continually get new people into the audience, meaning that your life is about fundraising.

When you think about it pessimistically it's a weird one to say "I 'own' 100k followers and I am going to try to extract as much money from them as possible" which is the incentive you are creating with that model, which again, most creators out side of crypto/decentraland don't think like that.

If you take out the "extract money" bit, then you just have what they already do, which is create things on interesting platforms, which means they don't have a need for a platform that extracts money.

P.S. Also, the point about the creator funds and payouts being small completely misses the point about what these platforms do for creators. They provide distribution. What you do this that distribution is up to you. You can sell chocolate, you can make 4 billion dollars on concert tours, you can create a brand called skims that is valued at 4 billions dollars, you can create a VC fund, etc. Gating that just reduces monetization potential, which is why Facebook doesn't have a paywall. Everything else is niche and you can create fine businesses there, i.e. Patreon, but nothing huge.

> This is a plan years in the making.

I have a really hard time believing that. To me, Threads clearly looks like Meta scrambling to take advantage of the opportunity handed to them by Twitter's self-destruction. In every way, Threads has looked unripe, slapdash.

If the "platform" was the point, then why did Threads ship without ActivityPub support?

> Martin Reece, creator of Micro.blog

It's Manton Reece. The author mostly lost me at the beginning, but here's where they totally lost me.

> Mastodon has experienced server admins and nine million users that Meta can siphon after it fully invades the platform.

Many Mastodon server admins are amateurs who are frankly not very qualified. I've had to perform two migrations (finally ending up at mastodon.social) because of incompetent and/or absentee server admins.

I used and loved app.net, but app.net was actually forced to pivot from a Twitter clone (it was a very good clone, the best ever IMO) to a "platform provider" because not enough Twitter users were wiling to abandon Twitter for app.net, so it couldn't achieve critical mass. Ironically, app.net started with the subcription model that Twitter is now trying to adopt for itself (without much success AFAIK).

> It sounds absurd that the biggest social media company would pivot from its golden goose. But when you peek into Meta's egg basket, you see it's empty.

Lost me there. Meta made $34B on digital advertising in Q3, if that's not a golden egg (from the investor perspective), IDK what is.

Starting a social network today is harder than it was 20 years ago. Content moderation, spam prevention, privacy controls have much higher expectations than they did.

I want to see competition in this space. Facebook investing in infrastructure to sell such that new products can compete with theirs seems like it might lead to that.

If Facebook were to develop these APIs, other platform providers could also implement similar APIs for products meaning that FB wouldn't be solely in control. I'm excited about new infrastructure in this play because I think it could lead to more dynamic peer to peer interactions.

app.net was great for developers. We made money each month based on user feedback. It was worth the higher membership fee to access all that too.

Sadly, and despite the way it was originally funded (by the users), I believe they took some VC funding, which ultimately killed the platform since it wasn't getting the growth that the investors wanted.

Actually, if Elon wants 'X' to become an 'everything app', one way which that could be done is through opening up to more app devs to build their own apps on the platform, as it used to be. Sadly, I don't think they've got the will or the manpower to do that these days.

Threads is terrible. It’s already dead.

I think threads still has a lot of time for it to grow, as meta with its deep pockets can afford to keep it running. Also there is some hate around Elon's acquisition of twitter, and whatever elon is doing (remaining to X). It makes a strong case that threads can at least keep growing, even after the hype drop after launch.

No, it's dead. It has completely vanished from public conscience, I literally forgot it existed for weeks until I saw this post. People don't even bother linking to it as an alternate platform on Twitter anymore, even bsky is way more popular in that regard.

People claiming it would be a huge success and would replace Twitter when it launched were already clearly a bit out of touch, anyone claiming it still has a chance to grow now is straight up delusional.

Since you're claiming to have insight into the actions of the general public I assume you have some numbers to back it up ?

Because Zuckerberg said 2 months ago it had 100m MAU which is very much the opposite of dead.

If "it has high MAU" is your only metric for whether or not a social platform is doing well, then Facebook is also still extremely successful and not struggling at all. But in reality we all know this isn't true, they likely wouldn't even have made Threads if it was.

Maybe don't move the goalpost.

Do you have some numbers to back up your claims ?

And Facebook is still extremely successful at least from a revenue perspective.

I have no data. All I know is personally, nobody I know uses it, nobody sends me links on it, and when I last visited it was all highly curated corporate or celebrity accounts. No thanks.

So this from the company that grossly inflated its viewership numbers to build false credibility for its video offering? You've gotta be kidding.

I’m not sure if this is true. I use Instagram a lot and the app keeps reminding me that it’s a thing. Whenever I open it I see a lot of content being posted. It does not feel dead.

What's your definition of "a lot of content"? I just logged into it and literally half of my feed was selfies of provocatively dressed women, and the other half was really generic and unfunny memes that I'd expect to see old people posting on facebook (I literally saw the "what color is this dress" image, I am not joking), and almost none of the text was in english. I didn't see a single post that I could say for sure was posted by a real person that was actually using threads.

Yes, everyone hates Twitter. Threads is dead. Mastodon is terrible and has no chance. Bluesky had a chance but their development team has proven they can't ship features, so it will die soon. There is currently no Twitter replacement contender.

Speak for yourself, not everyone.

I actually like X, it's much more enjoyable than Twitter used to be.

Spaces are seamless, it's cool to drop into a random conversation with hundreds of thousands of listeners.

Community notes actually gives great context without parading as a de-facto fact checker ran by a couple of companies with their own biases.

Twitter’s “community notes” is one of two things: 1) if it is 100% community based, then exactly the same as most upvoted tweet reply; 2) if it is moderated additionally, then exactly the same as fact checker run by a company with its own bias.

Which one is it?

it's neither of those which leads to your own lack of knowledge of the system.

you can see the source code of the algorithm here: https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes

there's a number of factors that goes into the rankings, like taking into account which other community note users rated it helpful and how they rated previous notes.

also simple usage of community notes would have revealed it was at least more sophisticated than the prison of two ideas you presented.

> the prison of two ideas you presented.

No need to be so dramatic. Looks like it’s in fact 100% community based, just the community is separate (the ‘community notes community’). The higher barrier to entry, compared to Twitter’s mainstream audience, is its saving grace (at least for now, as more time passes this seems susceptible to good old astroturphing, gaming, and eventually good faith contributors rage-quitting).

Such a high degree of certainty but without any actual argument is usually a certain sign of someone afflicted with Dunning-Krueger. Can you tell us anything about why you're so sure of all these things?

How's Threads doing from the POV of HN crowd? It seems to me like a clone of Instagram, with some celebreties double-posting their X or Instagram content to it. After its first few weeks, I probably have visited once a month.

I think the problem with Threads is they bootstrapped its user-base and content from Instagram. As a result, it feels a lot more like 'Instagram with a Twitter UI' than it does old-school Twitter, where yes there was a global platform (which HN notoriously hated) but there were also niche groups, programming communities, reverse engineering communities, etc.

Bluesky seems to be doing much better, it's more quiet which is problematic but feels much more like a blank slate, there are individual users I am following and hearing interesting things from that are not just cookie-cutter instagram posts. I am beginning to find tech people on the platform, etc.

Obligatory 'you can follow me there' I guess: https://bsky.app/profile/slimsag.com

I've never seen anyone ever post a link to Threads. As far as I can tell it doesn't even exist.

Overall it's doing incredibly well.

There has been a mass exodus of journalists, celebrities, brands etc from X over the last month with their communities following. The platform has been stable and performant. And new features slowly being added but implemented well.

The phase the platform is in now is dealing with OnlyFans account, engagement farmers etc. Which is very annoying as a user but tolerable for now.

The next phase will likely come when the API they are working on is released. Then hopefully we will get all of the useful bots back.

X just had their value written down by 75% by Fidelity so the company is on track to bankruptcy unless there are big changes. BlueSky is great but made the mistake of not opening up quick enough. So Threads for me is in the best position to capitalise.

Here's a comment I posted a few weeks ago about my experience with Threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38640884

In my various circles of diverse interests, I have literally only ever seen The Verge guys (as you mention) talk about Threads. They sure seem to love it, though I'm not entirely clear about why they chose it.

Everyone else I care about is on Bluesky and/or still on Twitter, so I've never touched Threads.

I use it quite a bit, alongside Mastodon and BlueSky. It's not released Twitter entirely at the moment (and honestly, neither of any of the other services), but there are a decent few gaming and tech creators I follow there, and my own posts do seem to get more interactions than on Twitter too.

I don’t think I ever got a chance to use it because I’m not in the US and can’t say I’ll miss it. Insta is dull enough

It's the number 1 app for iOS and Android in social category and even overall in some countries.

The Tech Threads community is thriving, as is Photography threads, among others.

It's not the toxic wasteland that is Twitter nowadays with Musk who spreads crazy qanon conspiracies

The title of the article is "Copy, Acquire, Kill— How Meta could pull off the most extraordinary pivot in tech history". The submission title is just the title of one section of the article.

Moderators changed the title.

That's odd. It seems to violate the HN guideline of using the original article title.

I thought it was odd too. I'm the OP. I googled it and changing the title seems like a well-documented occurrence. And I think it's part of their mod policy?

App.net was a small part of the post. I would think that the regulative capture part would be more relevant. But it's their website I guess.

> Thanks to Llama, Meta's open-source AI development tool, almost anyone can build their very own social media platform.

I don’t believe this in a second. Even if an AI could cobble code together to make an entire social media platform, there is a lot that goes into building something like this. Even if you could make a Twitter clone in an hour with Firebase, you have to figure out how to get people to use your platform, which usually seems to happen because of network effects.

It’s easier than ever to self learn your way to building a social network.

It’d still probably take a few months to go from 0 to fully functioning and stable twitter clone.

But it is easier than ever since you can ask llama to explain / find bugs in your code.

Asking it to write code totally from scratch is very hit or miss.

I‘m so happy to see App.net mentioned. I love that place and have been searching for something similar ever since. Yet I highly doubt Threads is that place (although I never tried it).

This piece suggests that Meta may be pivoting towards being a platform as a service provider for social media companies. Next, it highlights recent legislation and regulations that apply to social media companies that is costly to implement and benefits incumbents like Meta. Wouldn’t these same regulators be concerned about Meta becoming the centralized federation service between all these nodes and providers? They’d still have monopoly on ad revenue and content moderation.

Why would anyone trust Zuckerberg? You know, Facebook had the ability to create apps when it first opened to the general public. They dropped it - why would they start again?

I doubt Zuckerberg wants another social media company competing with him.

Does this mean that Meta is going to build a whole set of nodes, and possibly a blockchain to implement their own app.net app network, where facebook, whatsapp, messaging, will just be apps on their own platform?

Threads is the new Google+

I don't think it makes sense to justify this via insider exclusive about how 25% of Facebook's revenue would come from it in 5 years..when the comment was 5 years ago.

Threads...

https://hachyderm.io/@timbray@cosocial.ca/111637645737943991

> Wave of anti-trans attack in progress on #threads - someone has figured out to game the algorithm so it's in a high proportion of people's “For You” feeds. Not clear if it's a moderation failure or if Threads is ok with this stuff.

Will it host my Discord server?

> This is a plan years in the making. And we're watching Meta's biggest hurdle play out in real-time.

No.

Threads was not planned. Meta really really struggles with any long term execution.

Threads was the last of the "bottoms up" initiatives[0]. Had this been a properly sanctioned "bet" from the "product council"[1], they would have stuffed 200 engineers on it from the start and let them fight about scope until the money ran out (see most of the internal VR products, AR glasses, genAI, that crypto currency, market place, dating, etc)

Threads.net will never really truly be interoperable with mastodon for any particular length of time. As soon as shit like porn/spam/fraud starts to float around in high enough numbers to make someone important notice, the federation will be toned down.

Or, more likely, some "lead" engineer will want to put in a new feature to get themselves promoted and make a change that's not compatible with the wider fediverse.

Facebook cannot execute in any new market particularly well or fast. Threads was a fluke. It was one of the only self made products that actually taken off.

> But here's the question— why ActivityPub?

I suspect, and from what I've heard, is that threads is basically some horrid bastardisation of mastodon with the data store ported to facebook's internal graph store. It was done mostly for speed, so they could get something working to demo to the higher ups.

Now, that threads has numbers (so I assume) they will flood it with engineers, who will start adding useless ill-thought out featurettes that get promotions and move micro metrics, but degrade the entire platform.

[0] they are trying to steer to a central control system, but the problem is that nobody can plan. Those that can can't function because they've not been at facebook long enough to know who to wank off to get buy in.

[1]or what ever its called now, Cox's circle jerk, but less obviously taking the piss

> But he can't not grow the company. Wall Street won't allow it. And he can't grow it through acquisition because of anti-trust. He's stuck.

No, Zuck knows his bollocks are stapled to both google and apple. moreover FB/Insta have a limited shelf life. In order to survive, zuck has to own the next platform. His bet is that platform is AR/VR.

Hence why oculus is being pumped full of cash.

Zuck started his regulation push in 2019[1].

[1] https://archive.ph/Bt84I

yes, he did, but the postulation in this article is that threads is a specific step in that aim. That assertion, I believe is false.

You will note that a shit tonne of regulation types were fired, to the point where entire departments were shut down. The push to get FB friendly regulation has largely failed, its now morphing into continuous firefighting

ACCESS Act, RESTRICT Act, Child Safety Act, SAFE TECH Act are all in the house right now and relate to Zuck's four point plan. His efforts have been incredible successful so far.

It's pretty clearly regulative capture.

Didn't they turtlehead from the metaverse big time over the course of this year?

Alas no, just yeeted a bunch of support staff and engineers in a montecarlo style.

I can tell you that this article was written by someone who has never attempted to use Facebook’s developer tooling.

Their dev portal is constantly broken in different ways, it blocks you from making changes at random because it needs to run some kind of heuristics to see if you’re doing something malicious (even with webauthn 2fa).

We recently tried to get a Facebook app approved to use the pages_messaging permission. You need to have test users to pass verification. Unfortunately, you can no longer create test users on their platform since October of this year. If you try to use a real dummy user, it will get banned immediately when the application testers log in from another country.

Aside from that, you end up with corporate assets being owned by people’s personal Facebook accounts, because there’s no reasonable way to use SSO or similar. It’s just downright terrible.

I’ve used the offerings from all of the big tech companies, and Facebook/Metas is far and away the most hostile. You get what you pay for.

I will eat my hat if Meta successfully builds a cloud services platform for other tech companies given the state of their developer tooling in all their other business lines.

All this matches my experience. I’ll add that they recently closed down their bug reporting tool for most APIs; instead they point you to their empty, dead StackOverflow clone.

The bugs we do file sit in “assigned” for months, and the resolved in 30 days stat that used to be 95% is now down to the 50s.

For several years posts to Facebook Groups via API would fail if they had a dollar sign in them. Something to do with their spam and Marketplace handling black boxes.

That is a hilarious failure mode. I can imagine how it first happened, but to ignore it forever is bonkers.

Yet another data point for me that these huge companies just make too much money. Too insulated from the impact of bad decisions/priorities.

Why would it be necessary to use Facebook dev tools for end users to interop with, and as described by the article, eventually migrate their personal Mastodon user endpoint to threads.net via ActivityPub and the data portability stuff?

I assume that most Mastodon instances are run by someone who wouldn’t count as a simple end user — but for the article’s purposes, the server operators are statistically irrelevant, compared to the majority of merely-users.

Trying to pay them to display ads is a similar experience

yawn I’m sorry but why do we need a corporation to profit off of the social network we use? I am not excited for any new corporate social network because after using mastodon and lemmy it has become crystal clear that social networks as a “technology” are a terrible business. Either you make a social network healthy for its users or you profit off of them. Pick one.

It is like the concept of hospitals being privatized businesses. It is insane when you step back and actually think about it. Do I want the doctors, nurses, janitors and staff to get paid for doing hard work at the hospital?

Absolutely! Why does an abstract entity, the financial instrument of a private hospital, need to profit off of my care?

Hey I see a bright future for companies selling the service of turnkey lemmy, mastodon, pixelfed and peertube instances so maybe Facebook can get into that and be a nice little small reasonable company helping instance admins out instead of a monstrously poorly run corporation that tears apart the social fabric of society for profit.

edit wait did this article seriously just call the guy running the open source project mastodon, “CEO”…?

> edit wait did this article seriously just call the guy running the open source project mastodon, “CEO”…?

That is his title [0]. Other places calling him CEO include Flipboard's interview with him [1], and various tech articles [2].

[0]: His LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gargron/

[1]: https://about.flipboard.com/inside-flipboard/eugen-rochko/

[2]: https://www.wired.com/story/the-man-behind-mastodon-eugen-ro... and https://www.theverge.com/23658648/mastodon-ceo-twitter-inter...

People really forget that you can pay a small amount of money for paperwork and legally call yourself CEO, CTO or any other position you want in your own company.

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