It's certainly a skill to launch quickly at that scale. There are plenty of bureaucratically managed slowly launched duds too

I hate meta with a passion, but I don't deny they have some great infrastructure and engineers to enable the bad things they do to the world

What is threads lacking from a product perspective?

I guess its only real USP is "automatically import your Instagram friends", except that doesn't really work properly because only a fraction of people on Instagram seem to be interested in Threads.

Its fediverse integration stuff isn't panning out because nobody in the fediverse is stupid enough to let them federate. The single thread per message instead of hashtags thing doesn't seem to add a lot either.

The "product" in a social network is the community and the culture. Despite being terminally online I can't tell you what those look like for Threads. I can for FB/Insta/Twitter/Bsky/LinkedIn/Mastodon.

It was given no thought or advertisement or anything. It -feels- like an engineering marathon to make a safe space from Twitter.

I don't know that it's a bad effort, but it's one that rose and died seemingly the same day.

I feel like more time with a good product person would have given more thought to fit, advertising, release, and so on.

Novelty

What's it lacking?

purpose. value. actual users.

What? It has more than 300M users.

I think most of those are Instagram shoving it in your face. Yeah I'm a "Threads user", but only because of the inline feed in Instagram. I'm annoyed when there is a notification blip but it turns out to be Threads spam.

Same annoyance here!

Using it for what? Can someone list their fave Threads accounts so we can get a picture?

Today, maybe? I haven't kept up.

I'm talking specifically about its launch.

Threads' launch was intentionally rushed in order to capitalize on the user discontent at the time. Without a large alternative, enthusiasm to migrate to another social network would have waned. Note that Bluesky was still invite-only when Threads launched.

They had 100m account creations within the first 5 days.

How many of those are bots?

How many users on X (Twitter) or Bluesky are bots? It's reasonable to assume the percentages are the same, given the lack of public information for the major text-based broadcast social networks. X is estimated to have 250M daily active users. Mark Zuckerberg recently stated that Threads' DAUs were 100M. Threads achieving a bit under half the size in such a short time is impressive, especially since Threads still lacks many features that X has had for years.

> It's reasonable to assume the percentages are the same

It's reasonable to assume they're worse. Bluesky doesn't have Facebook's network or surveillance apparatus. Neither does Twitter, except it's a higher-value target than Bluesky and Threads combined.

And how many are Instagram users who created a Threads account after being prompted but never actually use it?

Daily Active Users (DAUs) and Monthly Active User counts represent the amount of users that perform activity on the application daily and monthly, respectively.

There is no industry standard for DAUs or MAUs. Take it all with a hefty grain of salt.