New Threads

One of the things that saddened me about leaving Twitter, last November, is that I was going to miss communicating with people with whom I had made connections over the dozen years that I had been on that platform.

Some of them had become real-life friends and I was going to miss keeping up-to-date on their daily musings.

When I moved over to Mastodon, however, I was pleased to find that many of these friends were also on this federated platform, and we continued our conversations as per usual. I also made some new virtual friends, and for the past nine months or so, I've really enjoyed this algorithm-free environment.

When I discovered that Twitter hadn't actually closed my account, as I had requested, I decided that I would use it to post announcements of my latest blog entries. I didn't voice any other thoughts or opinions, though every once and a while I would 'like' a friend's post if it showed up immediately in my feed.

I was done with scrolling in Twitter.

The day after Threads was launched, I opened an account. Being an Instagram user, the process was pretty simple and I was quickly able to connect with friends that I follow on Instagram who had also opened a Threads account.

Easy-peasy.

I also noticed that there were a lot of my Twitter friends who had joined this new Meta platform and I was happy to reconnect. Not all of my old Twitter buddies have joined Threads but I'm hopeful that I'll find them here eventually.

Mastodon is still my main platform. Because it's not exclusive to residing on a smartphone (I have a Mastodon page that is a permanent tab on my laptop's browser window), I interact on that platform more than anywhere else. It's the only place where I post a random photo of the day (taken from my online library by literally spinning the scroll bar and stopping on a random picture).

There are also posts that I publish to Mastodon and then copy that post to Threads. If you follow me on both platforms, you'll see a bit of duplication. I hope you don't mind.

And as of the one-week milestone of joining Threads, I've stopped using Twitter altogether. No blog post announcements. No peeking at posts in my immediate thread. I might check my account once a week (I haven't done so since last Thursday) to see if anyone has written specifically to me but I feel that by the end of July, I'll likely attempt to close the account again, this time hoping my request is fulfilled.

If not, I could probably throw barbs at Musk. Bruise his ego. Maybe then they'll close my account for good.

How about you? Have you tried Threads? What do you think? Leave a comment. Better yet, follow me at @brownknowser.

Happy Monday!