Elon Musk was so rattled by Threads that he threatened to sue it when it looked like it might dethrone Twitter as the social media platform of record. Its launch was well-timed to capitalize on the disgusting shitshow that Twitter had become under Musk’s control. But Mark Zuckerberg’s preemie clone is a lifeless void, and the BBC is the most prominent brand so far to call it quits.
Numerous brands are giving up on Threads by Instagram, allegedly due to lack of engagement (ironically, most of them are still using X, formally known as Twitter). What makes this news more interesting is the fact that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has abandoned its Threads account but is still maintaining its self-hosted Mastodon accounts online.
Threads wasn’t it. The problem is not that it was a a centralized service, in contrast to the distributed Mastodon. It’s just that Zuckerberg and Facebook are so unappetizing that even with every advantage they still have no user proposition to speak of. There is no constituency that trusts them, in any conceivable sense of the term. Threads was a brief, perfunctory media orgasm followed by depression, misery and the devil’s laughter.
The BBC, of course, already had the best Threads.