Today’s newsletter has some new usage stats for Threads, plus what Meta execs told employees is coming next during an internal Q&A yesterday.
First, the stats:
- 70+ billion impressions
- 450+ million posts (excluding reposts)
- 4.5+ billion likes
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/14/23795138/whats-next-for-instagram-threads-twitter
Re: ActivityPub integration, it's still a priority for Threads but a "long" way out.
Some other new info:
- The biggest region for Threads (by a wide margin) is the US, followed by Brazil.
- A team of just 3 product managers, 3 designers, and “50ish” engineers created & launched Threads in 5 months.
@alexeheath “a long way out”
This causes me zero surprise. They’ve got a walled garden with 100 million users, why would they bother putting effort into federating anytime soon?
Also, I’m not even sure how they’ll federate and not have a huge #GDPR problem. Hell, I’m not even sure how the Fediverse is GDPR compliant right now, but I think it’s too small to target and there’s no single company to target, so no authority knows what to do.
The big reason I see #Meta wanting to federate #Threads is to tap into a potentially massive amount of free content that it can then display to its users.
It might be that for a relatively minor engineering expenditure they would be receiving quite a lot to keep their readers using their service.
I wouldn't even be surprised if the engineering expenditure is dwarfed by the legal expenditure as they, yes, try to figure out how in the world GDPR fits into this whole thing.
