Over the last year, Twitter has gone from being one of the best and most inclusive open communities to a failing and toxic shadow of its former self. If Meta had tried to launch Threads then it would have been laughed off. Yet, just a year later, tens of millions have signed up to the new Instagram offshoot. Here I’ll try to explain how these affect this blog, and how you can interact with it.

Following Twitter’s ‘temporary’ measures to throttle the reading of tweets a week ago, I’m still there, although communication is fraught. As I spend much of the day working on my software and new articles to publish here, I’m trying to use Twitter for macOS, which only works fitfully at best. Every so often it spits a stream of tweets at me, ending with the warning that my rate limit has been exceeded. I also use Twitter for iOS on my iPhone, which doesn’t appear subject to rate limits to the extent that it floods me with ads and other promoted tweets instead. If anyone wanted to kill a platform quickly, I can’t see a more effective way other than turning it off completely.

I’m still not on Mastodon, where I could at last auto-post links to my articles. But there remain architectural issues that make it seriously unattractive: one is the fact that my articles cover two different spheres, macOS and painting, which doesn’t seem to fit with the way that Mastodon works. Besides, after encouraging growth late last year, Mastodon use has faltered this year, then came Threads.

Depending on your expectations, Instagram’s Threads might be the best news this year in social media. For those of us with WordPress blogs, it currently has little to offer, and a lot to lose. It bears all the hallmarks of a grudge-match between Musk and Zuckerberg, which I had hoped would have provided hilarious entertainment had the two ever fought in the flesh.

As you should expect from Meta and Instagram, Threads appears more interested in your personal data than it is in gaining free content like blogs. Currently only available on iOS and Android, it’s not yet accessible via the web. There doesn’t appear to be any API, so WordPress and Jetpack don’t offer any tools to post blog articles to Threads, nor to do so automatically as they used to with Twitter.

What’s more deeply concerning is its lack of privacy: Threads requires access to almost all your personal data, as outlined in its App Store entry.

Click on See Details and you’ll scroll through a list that can best be summarised as ‘all your data for any purpose we want’. While I don’t usually worry too much about privacy, this goes far beyond anything I’m prepared to accept, and I wonder how many of the tens of millions who have downloaded its app are really aware of what they have accepted so readily. It explains why Threads isn’t available in the EU, which would also prevent many of you from seeing posts I made to Threads.

Threads has been rushed to market, and shows it: development only started in January of this year, and it lacks even the basic suite of features found in Twitter.

So what of Bluesky Social, the other contender as a refuge from ailing Twitter? At least that was started in earnest two years ago as a spin-off from Twitter, but seems to have made slow progress since. As with Threads, it lacks a macOS app, and only supports iOS and Android, although at least it has web access. There’s no sign of any WordPress or Jetpack support, either. Maybe it will find its form in the near future.

The biggest threat to all of these comes in Twitter’s legal broadside against Threads. Not content with putting itself into a death-spiral, Twitter seems determined to prevent Instagram from winning over Twitter’s growing diaspora. Given Bluesky Social’s Twitter origins, that doesn’t look promising for its future either.

If someone had told me a year ago the state that Twitter and its potential competitors are in today, I wouldn’t have believed them. That it has been largely the mission of one individual is even more amazing.