I just tried Threads for about fifteen minutes. Currently, it's overwhelming and... not good.
Every single Threads user is displayed in your home feed, with zero option to only show content from people you're following. Hashtagging doesn't work yet, and most profile edits need to be done from your Instagram account, which clearly demonstrates that Threads isn't so much a Twitter/Mastodon/Bluesky competitor as much as it is an Instagram DLC.
I'm sure it's gonna do gangbusters since it's baked-in to the most popular social platform in the world, but... it sucks?
I've read similar. The inability to limit your feed to only those you're following alone would be enough to make me uninstall, even setting aside the company behind the app.
Add to that the inability to order the feed chronologically/sort by new, and I honestly don't see the appeal. If I wanted an algorithmic mess, Twitter's still shuffling along, but it has the option to see posts from those I follow in chronological order, and if I wanted Twitter but (at least for my interests and in my opinion) better...There's any number of general Mastodon instances I can join.
I'm sure they'll update & improve it to address some of these points, but for a company with a massive amount of resources to make a better first showing? This, at least if what I've read is accurate, is pretty pitiful, like when they've tried to rip off competitors' features but somehow worse despite more resources.
Not to the point of giving myself a brain anarchism. I mean you do you, but I'd rather have 10 root canals without anesthesia then spend a single second using a meta product.
This really isn't surprising. It almost feels like this was rushed. With a decent portion of Reddit's userbase revolting and the slow burning down of Twitter, there's been a small but still significant exodus to platforms like Lemmy, kbin, and Mastodon (to the tune of millions), which are platforms that don't really do data collection. For many, these either are, or have become, their only social media platforms, which means there's plenty of data (that they either didn't have access to, or lost access to) for them to hoover up with minimal obstruction.
My hope is that, at the very least, the largest instances across the fediverse just straight up cut them off. Even if all that does is make it harder for them to collect that precious, precious data, rather than make it impossible.