My first Meta Threads experience; the gripping tale of fat thumbs and Instagram accounts

Do we need another social media platform though, you may ask? In my everyday life, I have a Twitter account, a Facebook account, a TikTok account, a Discord account, an Instagram account… I could go on. Do I use them as frequently as I should? No - which would explain a lack of engagement rate (I refuse to believe the content I provide is just of poor quality…)

Friday morning, waking up and taking a look around for stories to pitch during the meeting, I took a moment to open Google Play and download Threads, having tried the night before to no avail. It helps that I have an Instagram account so signing up and signing in was seamless. Dare I say however if I don’t completely come to grips with it, or more than likely get bored of it, deleting said account sounds like it might be a bit of a hassle; essentially, at this point in time, I have to delete my Instagram account which isn’t ideal.

As is common when signing up to a new social media platform, Meta wants to go through my Facebook and Instagram friends list to add people I may know and, surprisingly, there were more people already on the platform than I anticipated. Mainly a lot of people I know in New Zealand, where the advent of new technology seems to take off a lot quicker than other places. That might just be Auckland though…

The layout is pretty much what everyone has touted it to be; a mixture of the dashboard of Instagram with a framework similar to Twitter. I can add links, images, write more than 280 words if I choose to, and it feels a little more lightweight compared to Twitter. I found myself pondering what my first post should be having joined Threads and went with the following.

Nothing too advanced, but later on when I decided to post the music piece I wrote Friday (quick plug for it for the backlinks) it was effortless. Which was one of the charms of Threads I immediately liked. Gone were the days of asking people to click away from my post and ask them to visit a link in my bio - the standard it seems for other outlets that use Instagram - and instead I could, with the aesthetic of Instagram, drop in a link for it to auto-populate the information, including scraping the image. 

Twitter also offers the same thing, though at times the scraping system picks up the meta-data rather than the image, and it would seem social media is always about visual content rather than merely written content.

I had a surf around other recommendations that were suggested and saw all the heavyweights had already pivoted towards Threads; Rolling Stone Magazine, Vice (who I thought were dead) and even the NME have already started to foster some form of authority on the platform, despite jokes that social media teams are still probably getting their head around how it all works.

It does have its limitations though; like any social media platform,it’s awfully lonely when you’re not following any feeds and the algorithm for myself, fresh onto the platform, hasn’t quite managed to pick up on some of my interests yet. Interestingly, some recommendations stem from my interests on the Instagram account - yet again demonstrating how the system, so far, is chained to Instagram rather than being its own thing.

I agree with the majority of posts I did see this morning though, especially how witty Channel 4 has become on the platform. The fun so far is that none of us really know what we are doing, so just trying what works and what doesn’t work; at this stage, it’s a level playing field uncorrupted by advertisers or echo chambers of hate. 

But like all nice things, someone is going to no doubt come along and ruin it, and much like we tried with the great exodus to Mastodon late last year, once the novelty wears off we’re all probably going to bump into each other, awkwardly might I add, once again on Twitter.

But until then, I’m enjoying the look and feel of Threads, and eagerly await the mixed martial arts bout between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg for the crown of “King of the Microblogging Platform.”

Then again, Reddit might want a word.