And lo! On the least useful day of the least useful week of summer, the foretold Twitter replacement emerged at last. Potentially. Threads, billed as “an Instagram app” by parent company Meta, née Facebook, launched on Wednesday and has already racked up some 30 million signups, according to Mark Zuckerberg. That sound you hear? It’s a nation of social media managers weeping, their fresh beach tans fading with every second of exposure to the fluorescing home screen of yet another app.
So, is this the one? Let’s first consider how things are going on Twitter, where over the weekend, the platform’s latest death rattle came in the form of temporary rate limits. Shortly after, the platform announced plans to charge for Tweetdeck, essentially a tax on its most ardent (and by definition, deranged) users. So maybe the time really is nigh. Instagram’s obvious leg up over other “Twitter killer” contenders like Substack Notes and Bluesky is the supposedly built-in network that awaits you on Threads: With one tap, you can send a mass request to follow everyone whom you already follow on Instagram. Less seamlessly, you then have to individually approve everyone requesting to follow you. (In 2023, the height of our technological aspiration apparently requires one to spend the better part of a dazzling summer day pressing “confirm” 500 times in a row.)
The Threads interface is extremely Twitter-like, of course. You can “heart” a post, reply, and repost it not only to your Threads feed (shall we call it the Spool?) but also to your Instagram Feed and your Instagram Stories and, hilariously, on Twitter itself. (Because life is not fair, I believe, sadly, that this is the only form of direct conflict we will see Zuckie and Muskie actually engage in; two billionaires slap-fighting by proxy of app features is proof that our sci-fi reality will be gobs more boring than we can begin to imagine). During my cursory spin on Threads, the only thing that surprised me was the clunkiness of the layout, as if Instagram—birthplace of capital-A aesthetics—couldn’t figure out how to work with so much white space. When I flipped back to Twitter, it felt like looking at an Old Master painting by comparison.
On Threads, as in all of these embryonic new platform wannabes, you’re more likely to notice what isn’t on there than what is—for now. Without bots or trolls or a crystallized top film of brands and ads, there’s relief—and a tantalizing promise of something finally civilized. But the familiarity can overwhelm. At least for now, Threads essentially confines you within your established Instagram network, which is as comforting as it is, well, tedious. Imagine sitting through a roll call of your entire contacts list (except this list came overwhelmingly preweighted in favor of, shall we say, the more visually successful among us). As it turns out, the prevailing theory that social media would be better if it was only limited to the verified deities and people we actually “know” (i.e., care about enough to suffer through their vacation photo dumps) is wrong. After a few hours, you start to really miss the randos.
The irony of Threads is that it’s not so much succeeding at replicating the experience of being on Twitter as it is proving how utterly hostage-esque the experience of being on Instagram has become. Over the past year, we’ve seen IG turn into a force-feeding nozzle trying to pump each of us into a submissive state of endless shopping and mediocre video-watching. The grid is only nominally more junked than Stories, where every other supposed portrait of chummy candor is sandwiched between ads that will probably follow you to your grave. No wonder Threads feels pleasant and twee. That’s how Instagram—and any online place not yet beholden to the economics of platform enshittification—used to be. Back when Bluesky was still the cool new kid in town, I wrote about the potential upside of our great Twitter Diasporic Moment: how new, untilled spaces can restore a sense of fun and chumminess but also the increasingly limited opportunity to experiment with one’s identity. In the face of the ongoing algorithmic deluge, an online self that resists cohesive packaging—that is, branding—paradoxically preserves a sense of true self we can still cling to. We get a few last gasps before the flood.
Threads pretends to be this kind of place, where you can still be anyone you want. But the truth is that your identity here is already spoken for. As many enthusiastic early adopters have already discovered, Meta is only interested in a package deal: if you want to delete your Threads profile one day, you’ll have to erase yourself on Instagram too.
So, once again, it looks like we’re still pretty stuck.
Delia Cai
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