Here’s hoping Threads is the last Twitter clone

So help me, I am not about to argue that anyone should root for Mark Zuckerberg. But if you’re dismayed by Elon Musk’s rapid unplanned disassembly of Twitter, you might find yourself reluctantly hopeful that Meta’s Threads will turn out to be a workable alternative.

I also won’t bother making a case for why it would be far preferable if a scrappy upstart such as Mastodon, Bluesky, or T2 ended up as the definitive destination for Twitter defectors. It’s self-explanatory. However, none of the upstarts can match Meta’s ability to ramp up something new with breathtaking speed—which, in Threads’ case, it did in part by making it readily available to anyone with an Instagram account.

Having racked up 100 million users in just five days, Meta’s Twitter-esque creation already has the scale it needs to make Musk sweat. So far, he’s responded with legal threats, insults, and the apparent stance that the opportunity to be attacked by strangers is one of Twitter’s virtues. It’s as if he’s trying to remind people why they might want to spend less time in his company.

As for the experience over on Threads, it all depends on whose stuff you see in your feed—which, since the app doesn’t offer a strictly reverse-chronological view of items from only people you chose to follow, is not entirely under your control. In a piece I enjoyed reading, Fast Company contributor Ryan Broderick concluded that Threads “has no purpose”—but then again, he didn’t help it find one by following anyone. Other takes are all over the place, calling it everything from “all the worst parts of Twitter and Instagram in one very bad app” to a “breath of fresh air.”

I have found Threads—where I’m @technologizer—quite pleasant so far, which means nothing. Almost every social network is nice at first, when it has that shiny new-app feel and is full of people talking about how nice it is. Sorry, Elon—it’s refreshing to spend time in a Twitter-like experience that, for now, is not rife with strangers attacking each other. (For the record, I know most of the folks who show up in my feed, or at least follow them on other social networks—it might not be precisely what I’ve asked for, but it’s not hypnotic algorithmic chum, either.)

Whether hundreds of millions of people will want to use this thing once the novelty has worn off, I’m not sure. But they might, and if Meta can’t turn that attention into a sustainable ad-supported business, nobody can.

Whatever happens, I hope Threads is the last major effort anyone makes to clone Twitter. For one thing, the more Twitter alternatives there are, the greater the chances of the Twitter diaspora fragmenting itself among multiple apps. That scenario might not be without its upsides, but it won’t result in any one service replicating one of the best things about Twitter: how its far-flung communities overlap with each other in ways that are unpredictable and—sometimes, at least—deeply rewarding.

More importantly, reflexively imitating Twitter is no way to come up with something meaningful on its own terms. I do see value in decentralized Twitter-style networks that aren’t run by anyone in particular, which is one of the fundamental ideas behind Mastodon and Bluesky. (Even Meta says that it will make Threads compatible with ActivityPub, the open protocol used by Mastodon—something that even the Zuckerberg-adverse among us should cautiously welcome.) Ultimately, though, slathering an interface nearly identical to Twitter on top of decentralized infrastructure leaves you with . . . a Twitter clone.

Social networks have often taken us to dark places, but at their best, they’ve created the kind of magic you don’t get by running someone else’s idea through a Xerox machine. Indeed, they’ve often been started more or less by accident. Twitter itself was originally a text-messaging-based social network created as a side project by a not-particularly-successful podcasting company. Facebook began as an online equivalent of a printed directory of Harvard students. TikTok’s roots are in Muscal.ly, which was entirely devoted to people lip-syncing to music for as little as 15 seconds. Even CompuServe’s CB Simulator—the spiritual great-granddaddy of all social networks—came to be only because a company that sold time-sharing services to businesses realized it could keep its computers running at night and get consumers to pay for dial-in privileges.

By running Twitter as if he’s actively trying to drive away users and advertisers, Musk has given a huge gift to everyone else interested in capturing online attention and marketing dollars. You can’t blame those who are trying to seize the opportunity. But the happiest ending of all would involve the next Twitter being something that hardly looks like Twitter at all.

This story is from Fast Company’s Plugged In newsletter, a weekly roundup of tech insights, news, and trends from global technology editor Harry McCracken, delivered to your inbox every Wednesday morning. Sign up for it here.