Is Threads the good place online?

NEW YORK: Once upon a time on social media, the nicest app of them all, Instagram, home to animal bloopers and filtered selfies, established a land called Threads, a hospitable alternative to the cursed X, Formerly Known as Twitter. X had been taken over by the Dark Lord Musk, he who reopened X’s gateway to its banished demons Donald Trump, Kanye West and Andrew Tate. The good people of X tried to flee, scattering to the hinterlands of Mastodon and Bluesky, whose distant confines they then complained about on X.

But Threads would provide a new refuge. It would be Twitter But Nice, a Good Place where X’s liberal exiles could gather around for a free exchange of ideas and maybe even a bit of that 2012 Twitter magic — the goofy memes, the insider riffing, the meeting of new online friends. A place where learnings and conversations were almost better than IRL engagement. With many key functions still in development, Threads even had a pleasingly lofi ambience.

I joined Threads shortly after its July 5 debut as an observer (having fled Twitter well before it X-ed itself out). At the beginning, early adopters waited by the sidelines, present but not posting, like seventh graders huddled by the door at a middle school dance. Periodically, someone called out, “Is anyone here?” “Should I be here?” and “Is everyone else at some other party?”

Meanwhile, on what Threadsters called the Other Place, people who’d spent years building squadrons of loyal followers saw their blue checks stripped, their diatribes less liked, their feeds infiltrated by bots. It seems anyone to the left of MAGA had decamped. They would have to leave, too, and start from scratch.

As more participants joined Threads, a palpable enthusiasm, even merriment, broke out; it was like watching a schoolyard of kids unleashed from detention. We’re going to build the best treehouse ever!

“All right, let’s do this thing,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted. “May this platform have good vibes, strong community, excellent humour and less harassment.” And now, after a mere 10 months, we can see exactly what we built: a full-on bizarro-world X, handcrafted for the left end of the political spectrum, complete with what one user astutely labelled “a cult type vibe.” If progressives and liberals were provoked by Trumpers and Breitbart types on Twitter, on Threads they have the opportunity to be wounded by their own kind.

Threads’ algorithm seems precision-tweaked to confront the user with posts devoted to whichever progressive position is slightly lefterthan-thou. It knows, for example, exactly where — on the left, bien sur — you stand with regard to the Middle East, gender ideology, D.E.I., body positivity, neurodivergence, Covid and the creative industries and shows you posts screaming from whichever position is just far enough from your own to drive you out of your mind.

In this microverse, arguments you probably didn’t know existed (Every time I see a white person in a kaffiyeh, I wonder: How much have you studied the issue?) devolve into accusations around tokenism, solidarity and identity. There is something guaranteed to offend anyone who wants to get offended — or your money back. Confessions of emotional upheaval and mental health crises operate like a kind of currency, a surefire way to accrue cred.

“Threads is a great example of how the left gets in its own way by parsing absolutely everything and anything anyone says or writes that is mildly positive or not negative enough or blah blah blah,” noted another user.