Isn’t this to be expected of any brand new platform though? Everybody floods in the first few days to check it out, and then it kind of tapers back to more realistic numbers as the novelty wears off. Not that I want to see it succeed, I’m just not sure these numbers are a good barometer for how successful the platform will be.
We're seeing the results of that right now. The reddit blackout was June 12-14, a month ago. We're finding out how many people checked things out during that and left as the users / 6month and users / month start to separate.
Same, I had made a mastodon account a few months back, so I played with that for a bit, then figured out lemmy. Just in the last 7 days, it feels like engagement has increased ten fold. I feel actually impactful here; which leads to more of my personal effort.
The guilty pleasure I get to indulge in while watching corpo-reddit flail around is just icing.
I've only seen the amount of comments and upvotes on posts increase. I don't know what that says about numbers, but even a small user base with that kind of engagement is awesome.
I don't even think their early growth numbers were real. Threads is an offshoot of Instagram, and there have been reports of accounts appearing spontaneously. It's entirely possible that they simply populated the service using existing Instagram accounts.
I get the feeling that nobody wants to deal with new platforms anymore. They are actively hostile to the idea and come in with unrealistic expectations. They want all the staple features and stability of a decade old major platform from day 1.
Maybe, but that's a HUGE decrease. These aren't flight-of-fancy numbers, these are exodus numbers.
Social networks really rely on a critical mass of users for viability. A lot of the draw for many twitter users is the engagement from celebrities and influcers.
I think a lot of people wanted to leave twitter, but just didn't really have a viable alternative with the critical mass of users and the celebrity engagement. If they already were uneasy about twitter as a platform and have something else to scratch that itch... I think the better question would be "What does Twitter offer that could draw them back?"
Sort of, yeah, but it's worth recognizing that this is a little different insofar as this isn't an independent new platform, this is directly linked to and leveraging the existing audience of Instagram into the platform.
This isn't the case of an independent new platform like, say, Kick trying to draw in an audience away from existing platforms to theirs. There's a distinct advantage here that they've clearly benefited from in terms of lowering the barrier to entry by not requiring a new account to be made. It may not sound like much, but every point of friction counts for anything new.