Agree, seems like a terrible decision. Twitter took off in part because people could post and have a wide audience. That audience is greatly reduced if there are no casuals allowed.
I am pretty sure the released product represents an extreme rush to market, and an incomplete representation of their intentions for it.
Reason: Meta has been having NDA'd meetings with admins of the larger Mastodon instances, and it's no secret that they intended to have this on the Fedi, which is also not in the current release. My assumption is that the NDA meetings were to promise fiscal help for instance admins who will necessarily get a huge flood of new traffic when Meta brings their tsunami of Intsadiocy to the Fedi infranet; my guess is it will be an amount of money that gives them a fair amount of discretion and which is pretty big to them, but pretty small to Meta. A means of getting the bigger "players" to let them execute their strategy, even knowing full well their intention to follow the Embrace with the formulaic Extend and Extinguish.
Most actual founders who actually know tech things also accept this deal when they get bought out. No reason not to think they'll bite, and most of them did, or at least, they went to the meetings and then started doing syrupy posts about "fair play" and "they get to have a chance," cause clearly the techbros have not yet had a chance to fully implement their genius plan that's totally gonna work guys.
And the whole "we love the openness" thing, I believe that as much as I believe Microsoft love Linux.
Not that Elon isn't their primary target, though why they're bothering I don't know, he's basically sitting in the middle of Main Street, covered in gasoline and holding a lighter screaming for attention. He's gonna get sent somewhere soon. Possibly space, who knows. But has really hung his ass waaaaaay out there the last week or two and I think they couldn't resist the urge to fuck it now rather than later.
Other reason I think they rushed is, the Fediverse as it was a couple weeks ago made their feelings pretty clear about federating with Meta, and I'm pretty sure they have been paying attention (not like the Fedi is private after all). Someone in the structure recognized that if they really do hope to execute the Embrace move, this is not the safe moment to do it.
Which means that the intense month of ActivityPub/Mastodon focused dev they've been doing has been premature, but they couldn't predict the last two weeks a month ago, so they're pivoting the product on the fly to a Twitter-grab posture.
My guess is that the people who were working on AP support are now either developing the WebUI for Threads, or else the implementation to allow people to view Threads through the Insta site, with a lightning fast rollout coming by end of next week.
They will still roll out to Mastodon as well, but I'm pretty sure from what I saw on the Fedi that they have come to understand that this is not the unsuspecting populace that they afflicted with Cambridge Analytica; this is a small subset of that population that learned the lesson thereof. If they hope to have anything to do with it, one thing is certain, they need to move slow.
huh ... i went to sign up and try it out but was confused why I couldn't find a way to do it from https://threads.net. I'm not interested in something that is just a mobile app rather than a general messaging platform.
Do they actually expect professionals (journalists, academics, etc etc) to all go use this on their phones? Oh well ....
I swear they must have. There is no way Zuck would launch this without at least reaching out to see where their heads were at. They must believe in their product and its branding more than a thick pile of cash.
Even the web reader view of this thread is horrifyingly janky for me on iOS safari; each tap seems to be a full, slow refresh of the site and loading screen.
