Of Threads and Skies and Squatting of Names

If you’re a writer or a creator, you most likely spent the weekend name-squatting on new social media sites. For the uninformed, name-squatting is when you reserve your username on websites just to prevent some Nigerian Prince or Russian sex bot from using your identity. I strongly suggest name-squatting for anyone with a public identity regardless of size.

Mark Zuckerberg launched Threads last Thursday to compete directly with Twitter. Threads is tied to your Instagram account and works mostly like Twitter without hashtags or trending topics (but, mute and block are still a thing, so that’s outstanding). It’s easy enough to launch, and The Zuck lets you connect to your Instagram followers as part of the initial launch, so in theory, you won’t be sitting at zero followers for awfully long. And with close to 100 million initial users this weekend, odds are your Instagram followers will be there. In the second salvo of the threaded Twitter war, Elon Musk played the “I’m a billionaire and you can’t do this to me” card by threatening litigation against Zuckerberg’s Meta corporation for poaching Twitter engineers. Meta replied by saying there are no former Twitter engineers working on Threads. And just to prove what a classy guy he is, Musk then challenged Zuck to a d!ck measuring contest. Personally, I’d rather see the two of them in a cage match.

The other social media site I was invited to this weekend (big thanks to Derek Austin Johnson for the invite) was Bluesky, a Twitter spin-off created by Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter. This one has more of a Twitter look and feel complete with feeds, notifications, and moderation. Still no hashtags, so following specific topics is a hit-or-miss proposition. Currently, Bluesky requires invitations for people to join, so lacks the user adoption rates of Threads. Last I checked, there are only about 300,000 users there.

Besides these two players, there are others like Mastodon, Hive, and Husslup, just to name three off the top of my head. Yes, I’m name-squatting on all of them, but honestly, I can’t remember the last time I checked Hive for any interactions. To me, the problem with these social media platforms is that they’re becoming a lot like streaming services: too many platforms and without enough differentiating them. But, of course, since there is money on the table in the form of your eyeballs, these platforms will continue to exist, and as artists, we need to have a presence. 

I am tonythescribe on most platforms so throw me a follow. And of course, subscribe here for more reports from the Strangeverse.

###