Why would anyone voluntarily use it anyway?
It’s been out for less than ten days and it already has more than 35x the number of total users as Mastodon. It might not be for us, but saying that no one would want to use it is just sour grapes.
It’s the volume of person data it scoops up. I don’t understand why anyone would happily share that much information just to use a social media app.
- The average person doesn’t know. I bet your parents don’t check the privacy policy when they download an app.
- The average person might not care. We live in an era where lots of people would literally put listening devices in their houses.
- If you’re already on Twitter, a decent amount of your data was already being shared anyways.
- Most people go to different social media platforms because (paradoxically) people are on those platforms.
- A decent amount of people might just dislike Musk because he calls people pedophiles for… helping kids or cucks for… making competing software??? So they’d rather give money to the next billionaire available.
This link has a decent comparison of a lot of social media sites’ privacy policies.
I’ve pretty quickly concluded that sour grapes are in no short supply here.
That so many people genuinely cannot fathom the concept that many people actually like social media - and may even be aware of the privacy cost and find it acceptable - really speaks more about how out-of-touch a lot of people here are than anything else.
The numbers are highly skewed because of the launch. A number of users are being paid to create content during the launch. A lot of the users are just checking out the hype. Some will stay, many won’t.
The numbers won’t really be useful or comparable until the dust settles. I give it a month.
Shadow profiles for a social media that require use through a mobile app that requires a bunch of permissions? I guess Windows and the Android app installation might be way around it. But, feel like even using just a random account on a phone exposes so much. Even tiktok you can sign up and use through just a browser or lurk without an account.
If you use it on the same devices, wifi networks, locations, etc as your regular Facebook/Insta then you’re not fooling anyone. Meta still knows it’s you, and will happily link the data from the shadow account back to your regular accounts. They can track you across the web even when you don’t have an account at all, because all of those “share to Facebook/Insta” buttons tell them that you visited the page and loaded the button. You don’t need to be signed in for those buttons to load. And you think a shadow account is going to protect you?
Why shouldn’t it? They are interested in personal data, not some fabricated online personalities.
Let it be the perfect counterargument to every moron who says “I’m not that important”. Yes, you are. If you weren’t, the Big Tech wouldn’t go to such length to acquire all the data about you, they can put their sweaty palms on.
Which has to mean that they’re blocking everyone from accessing Threads via VPN, since they can’t tell where the real source is beyond the VPN exit server.
Authoritarian regimes like China do this, too, unsuccessfully.
