I just tried Threads for about fifteen minutes. Currently, it's overwhelming and... not good.
Every single Threads user is displayed in your home feed, with zero option to only show content from people you're following. Hashtagging doesn't work yet, and most profile edits need to be done from your Instagram account, which clearly demonstrates that Threads isn't so much a Twitter/Mastodon/Bluesky competitor as much as it is an Instagram DLC.
I'm sure it's gonna do gangbusters since it's baked-in to the most popular social platform in the world, but... it sucks?
This really isn't surprising. It almost feels like this was rushed. With a decent portion of Reddit's userbase revolting and the slow burning down of Twitter, there's been a small but still significant exodus to platforms like Lemmy, kbin, and Mastodon (to the tune of millions), which are platforms that don't really do data collection. For many, these either are, or have become, their only social media platforms, which means there's plenty of data (that they either didn't have access to, or lost access to) for them to hoover up with minimal obstruction.
My hope is that, at the very least, the largest instances across the fediverse just straight up cut them off. Even if all that does is make it harder for them to collect that precious, precious data, rather than make it impossible.
I understand the why, I understand nothing about that list of instances or what it means. Is it a lot? A little? How do they link up? It’s just a list of what may as well be nonsense to me.