Against my better judgment, I decided to give Threads another try, and it’s only marginally better than I remembered, which was pretty awful. The main “For You” feed is filled with generic, uninteresting, often offensive comments and bland questions that have been asked a million times in other places or shouldn’t be asked anywhere. It all feels so synthetic; people posting something, anything for engagement.

One change Meta made while I was using the app was burying the “Following” feed, making the thing practically unusable. You’re forced to dig through Meta’s half-assed attempt to emulate Bluesky’s feeds menu to see the content you want to read. I really can't stress enough how truly awful the "For You" feed is.

For example, I'm recommended a post by a guy who asks his followers what the female equivalent of video games is. It’s video games, you moron. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if it wasn’t so constant and recommended to me based on some nebulous algorithm that clearly knows nothing about me other than that I like video games.

What’s worse, nobody called this clown on the question. People just answered it and played right into the sexism. On Threads, you can almost feel the brain cells dying the more you scroll and try to refine the feed. Eventually, you have to cut your (minimal) losses and move on.

Andy Baio:

Digging through SEC filings, I discovered that the newly-launched indie social network had taken nearly half a million in seed funding from a venture capital firm, which seemed counter to its indie manifesto.

Wow. I completely forgot about Ello.

I remember when it launched, people scrambling to get access to it. There was a ton of buzz. Unless I’m mistaken, you needed an invite, similar to Bluesky.

I loved the minimal design. I also really dug the attitude of the founders, sort of a “fuck you” to the big social networks. It felt true. It felt authentic.

Turns out, it was anything but.

I got my invite for Post and it’s rough, even for a beta.

Payment and tipping systems were prioritized over basic security features like muting and blocking (which are still unavailable as of this writing), privacy settings for posts are marked as “coming soon”, the mysterious “explore” section is prioritized over the feed of people you follow, and explore is exclusively US politics and the drama at Twitter.