Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads, is now available in the European Union, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
Today we’re opening Threads to more countries in Europe, Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Threads. The launch follows the service’s debut in the US and over 100 other countries across the world, including the UK, in July 2023. But until now, Threads hasn’t been available to the 448 million people living in the EU, and the company has even blocked EU-based users from accessing the service via VPN.To coincide with today’s launch, Meta is giving users in the region the ability to browse Threads without needing a profile. Actually posting or interacting with content will still require an Instagram account, however. The move was earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Jon Porter
Looks like I was right that Threads would launch in the European Union before having full ActivityPub compatibility. Threads is starting to test this, but it’s limited and one-sided at this stage, meaning you can’t post from other ActivityPub networks to Threads, nor move your account between services – a cynic might say this is a great tactic to improve the reach of Threads posts while giving nothing in return to the wider fediverse.
Evidently, I joined Threads the moment it became available, mostly out of curiosity than any expectation for a great experience. And having low expectations certainly helped, because my timeline is dominated by the sort of crap that made me avoid Facebook for several years now. There are photography related posts in the mix, but that’s an artifact of Threads running on your Instagram social graph and pushing people to connect with the same people they follow on Instagram. This is the flipside of having fulminant growth by piggybacking on an existing network: you get the initial buzz, but interest quickly dies down when people keep seeing unoriginal content.
The thing is, I’m not interested in seeing the same content in another app, so I’m probably going to start unfollowing (or muting) the accounts I follow on Instagram and search for other interests to follow – but that involves a sustained effort I’m not quite sure I want to make in Threads yet. This harkens back to a remark on Twitter in its early days, that each person’s experience is defined not by the app itself, but by the accounts they follow and interact with.
For me, Threads has a long way to go to compete with Twitter, both in terms of content and features. On the features side, what I’m missing now is a solution to schedule posts – I want to share my blog articles and links, but I don’t want to spam my followers with multiple links at once – and a section to keep track of my likes – on Twitter I would like tweets to save them for later and use the information for my articles or retweet them, which seems impossible on Treads at the moment.
I also dislike the constant and heavy-handed promotion of Threads in Instagram – as if that app needed any more junk bolted onto it: there’s a mini-carousel of Threads in the feed (that can’t be dismissed apparently), and a new button to share content to Threads (which compounds the issue of having the same content posted across apps, thus little differentiation between Threads and Instagram).
Ironically, Threads may be a better place to share photos than Instagram, because it doesn’t have the same constraints on aspect ratios that the photo feed on Instagram stubbornly maintains.
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