One year of Threads. Why Zuckerberg's social didn't beat Elon Musk's X

The latest creature conceived and wanted by Mark Zuckerberg officially turned one year old in the United States on Friday 5 July, while the European life of Meta's app is about seven months old, having been made available for public download on 14 December 2023. The Facebook founder's idea was clear from the outset: to revisit a social service much loved by the people of social networks such as Twitter and to offer a viable alternative to X, the platform that Elon Musk gave birth to last July (with the rebranding that drew on a character of the Unicode coding system, which assigns a unique number to each symbol that can be represented in computing), hinting at the outlines of a strategy aimed at transforming the former social network of the little bird into an 'everything app', an application for all uses. Threads presented itself as a tool that returns to giving importance to text in the form of short posts and that bets heavily on multimedia content (photos, videos and audio).

The Menlo Park company, as noted in a detailed article that appeared in TheVerge late last week, has been steadily improving the application to make it a perfect place for those who want to publish a story on a platform other than X. Threads, at the time of its launch, promised to be something different from the service Musk was modelling amidst the storm of advertisers fleeing Twitter: however meagre, the app allowed users to post 500-character text messages, integrate images and videos into posts, comment, like, post or share those of others. All this in total synergy with Instagram, whose accounts were immediately closely related to those activated on the new platform. At the time of its launch, hashtags and trending topics were not yet part of the Threads experience and the only feed available was the algorithmic feed, depriving users of the possibility of viewing only the posts of people they follow. The feed for followers arrived in less than a month, and more or less at the same time the actual web application was made available. It was launched in August, integrating features that were in some respects not very useful, such as the user experience reminiscent of TweetDeck, with the option of always having in view sections populated by the feeds of one's contacts, likes and saved posts. As TheVerge recalls, in any case, Zuckerberg's move has paid off: within the first five days, around 100 million people had tried the service (ChatGPT by Open AI, by way of comparison, took two months to have the same user base) and today (according to the latest findings of the Similarweb analysis company) there are a total of around 175 million active users on a monthly basis worldwide.

The work of fine-tuning conducted by Meta is certainly not finished, and among the shortcomings discussed in recent months are the 'Threads inbox', which the Californian company is still experimenting with, and more customisable tools for moderation. The decentralised protocol adopted by Meta is ActivityPub (the same as the one used by Mastodon) and the advantage guaranteed to users who are not part of the social network is that of being able to follow a user, like his posts, and see his replies displayed directly in Threads. The question of whether Threads will supplant X is difficult to answer, however, and the feeling is that the time for overtaking is not yet ripe. Not all users, for example, have found some of the platform's usage policies to be appropriate, such as the decision to exclude news and political content, offering users the possibility of restricting posts on this topic in their feeds. The next American elections, scheduled for November, will probably tell us whether this strategy devoted to 'moderate tones' will pay off, without forgetting that other players are also sitting at the table in the challenge for supremacy in social 2.0, starting with Bluesky, the platform headed by Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, which today counts around 5.9 million people in its community.

For Twitter nostalgics, this is the opinion of several insiders, Threads does not yet offer the appeal of the bluebird's social network, and there is still a long way to go to win over many established X users. Some important steps forward, however, there is no doubt, Meta has completed them and has well maximised the advantages of a graphic interface very similar to that of the current version of Elon Musk's platform and the consequent ease of orientation in the new app. From its

Threads can exhibit the fact that it is a much more 'real' discussion environment than X, having worked drastically to eliminate fake accounts and so-called 'trolls' (the subscription via Instagram to the new social network has lent a decisive hand in this regard). The cleanliness of the interface and the digital spaces made available to users are an element that could also make a difference in the long run, but the game is open and is partly played out around the definition that several users gave of Threads at the time of its entry onto the scene: 'Twitter before Musk's arrival'. As if to say, Mark versus Elon, in a duel that in a few months (perhaps) will give us more clues as to the potential winner.