Instant Messenger History: Lessons for the Threads Era of Social Media

https://tedium.co/2023/07/12/instant-messenger-competition-history/

by cpeterso • 3 years ago

72 76 3 years ago

Threads is an entire era now? Surely it's a liiiiittle too early to make that claim.

scrumper• 3 years ago

Maybe it's fair? It's the first major persistent broadcast messaging platform since Twitter popularized the concept with non-computer nerds.

TheRealPomax6• 3 years ago

"Maybe" isn't good enough.

madeofpalk• 3 years ago

I think it's fair to say that we have a post-twitter, or elon-twitter era when all of a sudden Twitter has a bunch of competition that it's never really had before. I wouldn't say it's Threads' era, but it does seem like something has happened.

Something has to be said about about the fact that now Meta decided to launch a Twitter clone.

soperj2• 3 years ago

Why? Did something have to be said when Google launched Google+? Or any of the other social platforms?

mjfl• 3 years ago

but Twitter didn't even matter when it was just Twitter. Twitter was a minor, failing social media site up until Musk bought it.

bonestamp2• 3 years ago

It has amassed 110 million users in a week. It feels like the start of something new and noteworthy. Maybe "era" isn't the right word, but I think we can still take away the message they're trying to convey.

autokad• 3 years ago

maybe, but massing users is not the same as massing people who actually use it. They just tied it to instagram no? It doesnt mean these users that clicked a button will actually use threads

TheRealPomax6• 3 years ago

Yes, it has given everyone who already had a Meta account, a new Meta account... so that's hardly an achievement for a platform with THREE BILLION USERS?

(Because 110 million is basically "no one" compared to the full FB userbase. It's just the statistical "a small percentage of a fuckton of people is still a lot of people")

is it active?

Because it sure doesn't sound like it is.

WaitWaitWha• 3 years ago

Can I get a bet of expounding on this?

I have nearly non-existent social media footprint, so please enlighten me.

How do we know that these 110mm users amassed were not just user accounts from existing Meta portfolio systems?

catsarebetter2• 3 years ago

100% they hit the right timing. People were looking to move into another platform.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=t...

My working theory is that because the nature of relationships on Twitter and IG (seed data for Threads) is different, the conversations will be different. If anything, Threads is going to be a hotspot for memes and pic-based content bc the pic features are way better already.

mhh__• 3 years ago

How many million users will it have next week? That's the real test, not just a new button appearing in an app where people tend to doom-scroll for hours.

Jeff_Brown2• 3 years ago

Indeed. What lawyers call "assuming a fact not in evidence".

catsarebetter2• 3 years ago

Way too early

PaulHoule• 3 years ago

It threads is basically successful (say 20 million people stay engaged) and it joins with the Fedi successfully I won’t feel bad about them calling it the “Threads era”.

I wouldn’t take either of the above for granted but I wouldn’t think either is impossible. What puzzles me the most is that Threads is seemingly 50 times larger than the Fedi already at which point there doesn’t seem to be any point in Thread joining it. Many people on the Fedi want to block Threads for various reasons, not least because some people don’t want to share a social network with anyone who disagrees with them, but also Threads doesn’t support features that are important to anyone who takes Fedi participation series such as image alt text and hashtags.

blitzar• 3 years ago

The argument, broadly, is that in the marketplace 2/3/4/5 years ago - anyone who launched a twitter clone, be it facebook, google, apple or god themself, was not going to get millions of users on day 1 and on day 2 would probably be shutting down.

Various changes in the market place have opened up things, possibly to more competition, posisibly to less, but a new era nevertheless.

TheRealPomax6• 3 years ago

There is no such thing as "a marketplace" when we're talking about a product with a user base of 3 billion users. There is no generalizing here: an immensely vast user base (with numbers you can't even phathom) was presented with a new service, signups for which had no downsides to click-through.

This is nothing like "clone apps" on a "marketplace". This is Facebook pushing an app out, and the world pretending it's somehow not just another Facebook app that BY DEFAULT will have several percent of the Facebook/Insta userbase signing up because, again, there is no downside.

Feeling cute, might cancel later.

Except cancelling turns out to be a mild inconvenience compared to signing up, so people won't bother.

5-• 3 years ago

current pidgin lead developer has been writing rather entertaining posts on pidgin and generally im history:

https://dev.to/grim

e.g. https://dev.to/grim/where-did-the-name-libpurple-come-from-4...

Zak3• 3 years ago

John Gruber... has suggested... instant messaging was a dead-end technology

I use Signal and WhatsApp daily. Most people I know use some sort of IM, though for some of them it's only iMessage.

It's interesting and a little surprising that none of the PC-based instant messaging services popular in the early 2000s were successful in making the jump to mobile, though some did produce mobile clients.

lintroller• 3 years ago

Mobile providers had no incentive to let the instant messaging services on their network when they were charging 10 cents per SMS message.

toast0• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure the major messengers all had integrations with at least US mobile providers. Because if you didn't have a messaging plan, you'd get charged 10 cents per message as it was delivered over SMS.

IMHO, the reason a mobile first network was more compelling than a desktop first network is that people tend to have their phones on them, while their desktops tend to be at their desks. For better or worse, you can always reach me on my phone.

Tencent developed QQ on desktop and then WeChat on mobile, but afaik, didn't bridge the two networks.

Zak3• 3 years ago

The iPhone app store and consumer Android devices both launched in 2008. Mobile providers didn't have a say after that.

wolpoli• 3 years ago

It's quite surprising that none of them Desktop leaders were able to leverage their network effect to move to Mobile. Through it's important to note that the mobile leaders today bootstrapped off the phone book.

Facebook messenger was quite something through. They bundled messenging into the Facebook app to get the network effect, then use the network effect to get people to install a separate messenger app.

katbyte• 3 years ago

they also now make it impossible (or at least very hard) to use messenger on a phone without installing their app. I rarely use fb except for marketplace and was meeting up with someone, i tried to use a browser like you can on a computer and nope had to install the app

lmm• 3 years ago

They all sucked. Sometimes it's that simple. Skype was the least bad when you were using it on a phone as well, and so it hung around right up until Zoom came along. But most instant messengers were bad, especially XMPP-based ones, and there was a lot of pressure to use XMPP. That's what killed the whole market.

kalleboo• 3 years ago

It's interesting and a little surprising that none of the PC-based instant messaging services popular in the early 2000s were successful in making the jump to mobile

I've read that it comes down to how at the time of the shift, companies were realizing that there was just no money in running IM networks, so they were unwilling to invest much in them.

distantsounds• 3 years ago

I would absolutely love to run my own little TOC/OSCAR server and host my own private AIM community. The only implementation I found is the closed-source AIM Phoenix project, is anyone aware of one?

booleandilemma• 3 years ago

But the problem is that some of your friends went to Threads. Some of them went to Bluesky. Some went to Mastodon. Some went to T2.

I don't think multiple social networks is a problem. I don't want one network that everyone is on. Let them be split up by interest or age or whatever. It's natural.

What I post on HN isn't what I would post on "Social Network X" anyway, there's no need for syndication. The only people that need to care about having their comments go everywhere are influencers and marketers - and who cares what they want.

esafak3• 3 years ago

It is if they target the same use case. I resent having to use WhatsApp alongside Signal. And iMessage and SMS. Want to review the conversation you had with so-and-so the other day ? You have to check multiple apps if you forgot where.

I miss Trillian. I miss standards.

ajayyy• 3 years ago

That will will be fixed Q1 next year thanks to the EU

rconti2• 3 years ago

That's ironic. At least in the brief time I used Windows, Trillian had the worst dumpster fire of a UI. I can't say I really liked Windows UI, but they didn't even attempt to conform to it to make it half-usable.

greyface-• 3 years ago

Few of the protocols that Trillian spoke were standardized; most were reverse engineered. It was an era of adversarial interoperability, not standards.

I miss it too, though.

Teever• 3 years ago

Imagine a 20th century where people with telephones from GE couldn't phone people with telephones from RCA. That's obviously ridiculous and regulations prevented it.

How the hell did we went up here?

Dalewyn2• 3 years ago

Back in the day I had accounts on AIM and MSN Messenger, accounts on at least half a dozen various forums powered by Invision and phpBB, accounts on half a dozen IRC networks, and it felt perfectly fine to go from one to the other as the situation demanded. I'm not even including MMORPGs, which were as much communities as they were games.

Nowadays I still use IRC like I used to before, but I miss the rest of the good old days.

soupfordummies• 3 years ago

What’s the scene like on IRC these days?

cainxinth• 3 years ago

A fractured microblogging ecosystem doesn’t bother me at all because I never use any of them directly. Like many here, I assume, I use link aggregators (like HN, Reddit, and many others).

jaimex2• 3 years ago

Jesus, another whiny Musk ruined everything sap.

Twitter hasn't changed a bit other than no longer perma banning.

You wouldn't even know its under new management if mainstream media didn't put the agenda in your heads.

And for the love of god, we don't need another Meta social media platform or anything else for that matter. If Musk is cancer Meta is the cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s, ALS suite.

noarchy• 3 years ago

You wouldn't even know its under new management if mainstream media didn't put the agenda in your heads.

Aside from Musk pushing his own tweets in your feed?

sidibe• 3 years ago

Or all the ignorant blue check top responses to any popular tweet. You wouldn't know it's under new management only if you'd never been there before.

spike021• 3 years ago

I'm not sure if this is Musk-related, but Twitter has definitely changed.

* More ads, not as easy to hide them with traditional blocker

* More bots - I'm a baseball fan and follow a lot of baseball people, and players in particular are big on custom tshirts that are only usually sold by a special MLB-licensed vendor. However, there will be tweets with a photo or video and multiple replies by scam bots saying "tshirt available at xyz.example!!" and then a plethora more bots replying to that thread saying "thanks just ordered mine!" or variations of that

* Not sure if "bot", but there are a few OnlyFans style bots or even maybe just users where I constantly see them reply tweets but only one at a time; I block them every time because I'm not interested, only for another variation with slightly different name but the same "person" showing up the next day or so.

I don't know what's changed for those things to happen, but they've definitely increased or outright started just in the past year.

sanderjd5• 3 years ago

I mean, I used to go read new tweets from a few accounts every once in awhile, and now I suddenly can't do that without making an account. So now I don't go there at all, which is a pretty big change for me...

imwillofficial• 3 years ago

There is no Threads era

firewolf34• 3 years ago

Y'all remember when back in the 2000's there was so many IM apps that people made tools like Meebo to organize them all into one messenger utility?

Why isn't there just one giant firehose API which merges all the socials into one intake feed. Then I could filter it down for useful data and discard the rest. This probably already exists, but, just my thoughts from the article!

Instant Messenger History: Lessons for the Threads Era of Social Media

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