The Vergecast - Instagram Threads is here to crush Twitter

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

The Verge's David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Alex Heath discuss Meta's launch of Threads, a new competitor to Twitter. Later, Nilay Patel calls in to give his take. Further reading: Instagram Threads: why Meta is competing with Twitter Meta unspools Threads Instagram’s Threads: everything you need to know about the new Twitter competitor Instagram’s Twitter competitor, Threads, briefly went live on the web Instagram Threads won’t be available in the EU at launch.  People are posting a lot on Threads. Here’s how Twitter’s leadership is responding to Instagram Threads. Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko on what Threads means for the fediverse. Instagram flooded Threads with celebrities and brands at launch So what’s next for Threads? DMs “maybe...” Mark Zuckerberg on when Instagram Threads will get ads Spielberg, Scorsese, and Anderson have swooped in to save Turner Classic Movies  Google confirms it’s training AI using scraped web data The TSA will use facial recognition in over 400 airports Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of cloning other people's apps and calling them slightly different names. I'm your friend David Pierce, and that is all we're going to talk about today. Alex Kranz is here.

Hi, Alex. I'm your friend who wants to start a new website called The Flurge. It's fine. It's about flurge. It's like a flirty verge. Yeah. Ooh, I like that better.

There's better. That's better. I love it. Alex Heath is here from, I think, a studio or just a surprisingly soundproof place? I don't know. What's going on? It's not that secret. It's our LA office. But, yes, I suppose secret for all intensive purposes.

We have to make sure Adam Masseri can't find you. That's the important thing. I am here and I have too many damn apps on my phone. I'm not sure what to do about it. I don't know about you all. I think it was Walt Mossberg who posted something today with just a folder of apps called new Twitter question mark. And there were like 10 apps in there.

It's like, yeah, this is the world we live in now. I suspect we are going to spend the entirety of this show talking about Instagram threads. So anyone who is expecting anything else, I'm so very sorry. This is what we're doing here. We just lost half the audience. Yeah, it's fine. We got a lightning round. Stick around for the lightning round.

Yeah, listen, if you want me to have strong feelings about nothing phone leaks, just wait two or three hours and we'll be there. But let's just get into this. So as we're recording this, it's Thursday afternoon. This app has been live for less than 24 hours and kind of already feels like it has taken over the universe. Heath, you've been tracking this kind of minute to minute as it has launched. Where do we stand? How is this thing going so far? Yeah. So as we're recording this, Mark Zuckerberg shared on threads this morning that they have surpassed 30 million signups, which I want to be clear,

blows away the internal projections they had for this thing by a crazy multiple. They're now internally at Meta talking about can we beat the chat GPT record for the fastest. Oh, wow. consumer software product at 100 million users. So that's the scale of threads right now. There have been over 95 million posts, or I guess threads they're called, spools, whatever you want to call them. We're going to get to that, don't you worry. Yeah, on threads to date, according to some internal data I reported on this morning on

the site. And that sounds like a huge number, but what I think it shows is if you actually map it to the publicly stated signups, you're seeing a. similar thing happened to Twitter where, and this has been true of Twitter from the earliest days, a very small percent of the overall users contribute much of the content. And that similar dynamic is starting to play out on threads even, you know, before it's a week old. Yeah, so let's actually go back a bunch because the launch was super fascinating. We were all in sort of watching people roll in. I was going to say we should all compare numbers of who got in first, but Heath you won,

so that's no fun. Yeah, Heath cheated though. User 2, 777. Wow. something. Wow. Look at you. Look at that flex. It's a flex. So back story on this. There were only about a thousand people on this app, all mostly internal meta people and some friends on the 4th of July. They were at just under 3,000 users when I came on and this was probably four or five hours before public launch. They really moved quickly on this thing. They weren't actually planning to release threads this week. They were planning to do it next week. And what happened is they saw the Elon rate limit fiasco on Twitter over the 4th of July weekend and rushed it out and employees started working on the holiday to get it out. They wanted to have more time for

celebs to get onboarded. Selebs didn't get onboarded until about a day before public launch. So this is all moving really fast. I had wondered about that actually because you could not have imagined a more perfect time to launch an app like this. And there have been a lot of these sort of fortuitous moments to try and compete with Twitter over the last eight months or so. But this one in particular, because I think what was it Saturday the second, I think, was when Elon tweeted were rate limiting people. And if you're not paying, you only get to see 600 tweets a day. They put up the login thing so you couldn't see tweets unless you were logged in. And there was this very clear, like, closing down the walls of Twitter thing that everybody, some combination of thought was stupid and ruthlessly made fun of, both of which I think were correct responses to those moves.

But then I was just thinking about this yesterday as this. launch happened. Like, holy God, what a perfect moment if I'm a meta executive sitting there saying, we're about to launch a thing that kind of looks a lot like Twitter. And if they had launched this four years ago, everybody would have been like, oh, God, they launched Twitter. But now they pick this perfect moment and everybody's like, oh, my God, they launched Twitter. It's the best news of all time somehow. I thought it was impressive that they got around, like, a lot of people might have assumed that the rate limiting and everything was in reaction to the impending launch. And it was like, no, this is very clearly, these guys suck.

we're going to do it too and hopefully we suck less. How weird is it that we're talking about meta in like the context of a good guy almost right now? Yeah. It's very strange. I think that's like I don't want to call them a good guy

but a more pleasing alternative. Okay, that's more fair I guess. But like Zuck is on threads like boasting about how many hours he gets to sleep a night and posting picks of him spending time with his baby in the morning. It is meanwhile like record signups. like it's just this level of like them feeling good and getting really positive energy that I

haven't seen in a very, very long time for meta. It is really fascinating. And that's actually, you talked to Adam Masary, I think, in like the hours running up to the launch. And that was one of the things you guys talked about, right? Because there were, there are two things about being meta that are very funny to me here. One is that like over the last, say, half decade, I can't think of a company. More people have said, oh, maybe they shouldn't be in charge of all of our social networks. Like, meta has not been a company you want running your social life over the last several

years. And then on the flip side, meta's history of launching new apps is like as bad as any company other than Google that I can think of. It launched a thing called threads already and killed it. But you were talking to Adam and the sense I got was there's a lot of confidence inside that company for how they can do something like this right now. Yeah, I think they were confident, but they were at least publicly trying to project the sense of like Adam told me, it was a risky bet that they know that launching a new app in the year 20203 has a much more likely chance of failing than not versus tacking it on to an existing app like Instagram that already has over a billion users.

I think they're being proven in their early signups that the instinct was right to split it off. And as Moserri kind of explained it to me, the main reason for doing so is they wanted to give equal weight to not only the posts but the comments. and on Instagram, that's just really not an intuitive experience. It doesn't make sense on Instagram. And it's really Twitter's magic. And threads.

I mean, it's called threads. They want the threads to be the most prominent thing. And they realized to do that, they wanted to split it out. They've been trying to simplify Instagram. They didn't want to add another tab, which I am very much in favor for. And it's smart to use the Instagram social graph as the kickoff here and let you bring your Instagram onto threads because the kinds of people on Instagram who are at, active posters probably maps the closest to Twitter's most active posters than any of meta's

properties. Yeah, I think if it had tried to pull your Facebook friends, it would have vibed very differently. Yeah. And I was just thinking about this as I was going through because I think one of the first things you have to do is basically decide, like, do you want to bring your Instagram graph in with you when you sign up for it? If I'm remembering it right, this is all so long ago now, you have to use your Instagram handle, but then you sort of get to choose what else from Instagram you want to bring in, right? There's like a button that's like, do you want your Instagram bio. There's another button that's like, do you want your followers and follows? And I was just thinking about it. And I was like, my Facebook friend graph, I just have not like thought about or

touched in years. And so it's like all of my exes and people I don't talk to from high school and like my random relatives who I don't ever talk to otherwise who have crazy political opinions. I don't want that in another social app. You don't want your college class mates opinions on RFK Jr. in threads? Yeah, believe it or not. Come on, David. I went to college in the South. Let's just say that. Same. It's awesome. Yeah. Same. That's why I said that. But yeah, Instagram seems to be the kind of place people curate a little more and pay a little more attention to. And I think that for me was like the startup there was really nice in that I just hit the like follow everybody. And it has mostly been okay so far. Yeah. There's something about

meta's relationship with the news industry here that I think it's important for us to talk about early on, and I'm curious what you guys think of that. I know they really do not want to, I guess, embrace the news industry on threads, even though they know that that's critical to actually killing Twitter. That's Twitter's, at least up until Elon, that was Twitter's lifeblood, was the fact that news broke on Twitter. Meta has been actively trying to distance itself from the news industry for the last several years. They've been literally deprioritizing news in the feed on Facebook and Instagram. And they didn't do any, you know, concerted outreach to big media brands, to journalists ahead of this besides me and a handful of others getting access a few hours early just to just to see it to write about it. And I think for this thing to succeed, they have to embrace the news industry. If they want threads to be the kind of, as they say, public conversation platform, news is such a critical part of that.

and it's what people got a lot of value out of Twitter for. I think they hope that threads will just be this kind of text version of Instagram with all the creators on Instagram, the athletes, the celebrities, the influencers, and all of that. But I think for threads to really be the Twitter killer, it has to nail news. And I'm not sure META has the institutional appetite to embrace that right now. And I'm not sure what that means. Well, I think they're scared of it, right? Because, like, when they embraced news, there was congressional hearings.

I mean, they're literally being, like, sued and forced by the Canadian government and others to pay news publishers for links. And they're saying, we were literally just turn off news in your country rather than pay you to post links, which we could, that's a whole other. I actually think they're right on that, but that's a whole other discussion. There's an interesting because there's an opportunity here for them because this is a different product, because it is treated differently by the users so far. And kind of perceived differently by everyone, there's a real opportunity. here to make that pivot and to actually like be a good partner with news organizations. But I think you're right. There doesn't seem to be any appetite. I don't know how they get that. There's two parts of that. Do news organizations want to be partners with meta? I can tell you no. Yeah. Right. Yeah. No. Do journalists want a

Twitter alternative? Absolutely. So it may be this bottom up kind of bubbling thing that forces the big publishers to embrace it. Honestly, I think that's the way they get out of it too, right? Like the problem that they're terrified of is, are we putting MSNBC at the top rather than Fox News and thus we're like censoring people, right? That's the terror there. That's the fear is that they're going to be accused of censorship from one side or the other of this mass politicization of news. And you can get around that by like just not being a part of that, by also de-emphasizing

algorithms and doing that stuff, which the algorithm side of this is kind of interesting, right? like the that main feed no like do you know what's going on there because no one on thread does are y'all's feeds like 97% people you don't know mine is overwhelmingly people I don't know mine starts people I know and then the further I go they're like all right I'm just going to start throwing you some other people I followed a lot of people right before it went to public launch so I may have a skewed like version of this but I've been following people pretty quickly I don't actually they actually hide how many people you're following which is an interesting choice I follow a lot of people. It's actually been pretty good also at surfacing people that I would want to

follow that people I follow have responded to and I can see the little plus icon and tap it in the feed. I do definitely get, you're already seeing the Instagram, LinkedIn type thirst trap influencer on there. It's crazy. The hustle bros found it so fast. Yeah. As the network builds, I have a feeling that will get sorted out and they're going to keep, there's no one who understands tweaking algorithms better than meta to produce outcomes. So they're doing a very light ranked version of basically the Instagram feed for this in terms of what is prioritized. This is built off of Instagram's tech stack. This is basically a different version of Instagram. So no boobies. No boobies. No nudity at all, which is actually a very key difference to Twitter. And I saw a very

funny tweet today that just said Twitter may just become Tumblr for in cells after all this. But yeah, there's no nudity. This is the Instagram code of conduct, community guidelines. There are, I saw some internal docs on this where very severe violations, so sharing CSAM, that sort of thing on threads will result in penalties on your Instagram account. But for the vast majority of things, misinformation, bullying, that sort of thing, the penalties and strikes you get on threads will not port over to your Instagram account. So for now, at least they are treating the apps, even though they're sharing account data as separate things to moderate. How is that moderation going to work? Because I feel like, like, Instagram is less of a trash fire than a lot of the other social media products out there, right? And it's because of that extensive moderation.

But also, how does that help foster the conversations that they seem to want to foster? I mean, over a billion users, I don't know, seems to be working. That's fair. I mean, everyone has their own view of this, right? You can have a wildly different experience based on who you are, your race, your gender, your identity, all those things, right? This is the thing with these social networks is we have our own opinions that are based on our own. view of them and we're really unable to see the full picture. The only one who sees the full picture is Mark Zuckerberg. They think they can make a nicer version of Twitter. Zuckerberg's been

very clear about that publicly in threads and sees the fact that Twitter has become meaner and I would say a much less friendly place to be in the last several months. And it's very just ironic to me that this is meta now coming in and saying, we're going to make the nice social network. Yes, we contributed to people rioting January 6th, but that was a long time ago. Let's forget about that. Let's move on. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it.

I just went back and found a big wired feature that happened when I was there when Kevin Sistram was in charge of Instagram about how they wanted to make Instagram the nicer place and basically moderate more aggressively and push harder towards being a place where people are actually nice to each other. And I do think to some extent that worked. I also think the way Instagram is structured has hidden a lot of that, right? And that goes back to the like posts and comments thing. It's like the awful stuff people do to each other in replies to stories, most people don't see. Like so much of what happens on Facebook, people see because it's there.

And on Twitter, it's even more public. So it's more obvious. Whereas Instagram is like everything is kind of a couple of layers down. So just your exposure to the bad stuff that happens on Instagram as a bystander. is just much less, which I think is the thing that is so interesting about threads. And back to your point about the news business coming in, this app is so deliberately public, right? Like there's no DMs, there's no groups, there's no community. Like, and Masary keeps saying over and over, like, we see this as a place for public conversations.

And I think what that's going to do is just show the whole platform to everybody. And especially as they do things like improve search. And if hashtags become a thing, like it's just going to be easier to move around inside of threads. And as you do, whatever they don't do moderation-wise is going to become really obvious, really fast. And I wonder how that changes the way people feel about the platform when you can just see. Yeah, I will say that institutionally meta is in a much different spot that it was in 2016, 2017, 2018. They realized that they really oversensored, at least they think that now in retrospect. Even honestly, through the COVID pandemic, I think they would do some of that.

that differently. I think a lot of the big internet platforms would in terms of what was initially censored versus not. And I do think they want to be a little looser on the censorship this time. And that is a general sentiment in Silicon Valley at the big internet platforms that we are entering a looser phase of the internet in that regard. I also think if I'm meta, I have been sort of, I don't know, bullied into not caring anymore about some of these things now. Like Nick Clegg gets paid a lot of money to take everyone's heat about all things content moderation, and the rest of the company just doesn't have to care that much. Like, Mark Zuckerberg is off doing other things. He's not picking political fights anymore. He's like, oh, Congress wants to yell at us again.

Like, whatever. We're going to keep doing our thing. I just think if I'm meta, they're like so inert to this at this point that I think that fear doesn't seem to exist within the company as much as it used to. Well, for now, until we have the Threads election. Well, yeah, that's fair. Yeah, 2026 or I guess 2028 election is going to be wild on threads. You don't think it's going to be 2024? At this rate, if they hit 100 million users in a week, I mean, is RFK Jr. on there yet? The Threads chat GPT election is just going to be outrageous. No one is ready for this.

Alex, can we talk about what we call these things yet? Alex Kranz. I mean, I have really strong opinions about it. I know you do. I know you do, Kranz. And I know you guys all think I'm wrong, but we should just call them tweets. Make the case for this. this. I would like to come back to this, but you wrote the thing about it, so you get to go first.

I wrote it and I was the best comment I got with somebody being like, I thought this was just going to be memes and you actually had an argument. And I was like, yes, that's right. I thought about this for more than two minutes, at least three minutes. We call that the crayons special. This seems like I'm just bullshitting you, but I actually have some thoughts here. But, you know, tweets started as a thing that was necessary because an app needed to put something on there besides post, because I think post in that language was, like, weird. That's why it started. And they were like, oh, you should just call it a twit. He was like, calling it a twit. And everybody's like, that's stupid. Call it a tweet. And he's like, oh, that's a real

word. I'll just use that. Because it's a real word that already exists and everybody likes it. And you know us what it means. And we've, we associate it with Twitter because they eventually trademarked it. So that's fair. But it originally started to just like, I need a way to like pop off a pithy response. That's called a tweet. And I think like it's, it's, It surpassed the company that trademarked it, right? Like a Kleenex. You're not checking what brand of Kleenex it is. It's just Kleenex.

Same with E-ink. It's almost certainly E-ink. But like, you're not checking what brand of electronic paper it is. You're just going to assume it's E-ink. Google's really the example here, right? Yeah, Google is the best example of this. You Google stuff on Bing now. Like, that's a thing people do.

They go to Bing.com and they Google something. Google hates that. It's hilarious. They hate it so much. I think it's a normal thing that the English language does. I think it's okay to accept it and embrace it. And I think that I'm really tired of every single time there's a new platform, everybody being like, I got the jokes. What are we going to call this one? And then we have to have like this joke conversation for three cycles. It feels like

and everybody's just like, ah, here's my jokes. And I'm like, no, just call them tweets. I worry sometimes that it's not a joke. Like, Blue Sky users seem to think they're called skeets. And on Macedon, they are technically called Toots. Like, this is. is the world we live in now. Like, we, we can't let this happen. We can't. They got rid of Toots. What's the guy? Like, the guy didn't know that it meant fart in English. And so, like, a YouTuber was like, hey, I'll pay your Patreon if you keep using Toot because it's so funny. And he's like, okay. And so he did. And then later he was like, oh, I's saying farts all this time. That sucks. And he got rid of it. Like, it was like November 2022. He was like, we're getting rid of Toots.

And the Mastodon users were like, not our Toots. And it's like, I don't want to be involved in that conversation, you're fighting for the word toot. If I ever pick it for anything, I'm going to write not our toots on my sign. That's just, that's what the sign is going to say. Heath, they really want to call it threads, right? That's the, that's the idea. That's the official. That's the official thing. You're going to threads on threads. That sucks, right? Like, we don't, we don't like this. Or just call it a post. Like, we don't, you know, let's not overthink this. Like, we're posting. We're posting on Maine. But they're little posts. Post on Maine. We're going to open a diner called posting on Maine. They're 500 characters. They're bigger than tweets.

you talking about, Kranz? 500 characters is not a lot. It's bigger than tweets. It's bigger. It's bigger than tweets, but it's still smaller than a blog. What is a blog anymore? These are all posts. They're just posts.

Don't call it tweet. We have to be able to drill down. We have to be able to be like, like, micro, like, I don't want to do micro blogs. I don't want to call them micro post. That's stupid. We're posting on Maine. The at Verge account, Rubin, he's going wild right now. He's posting on Maine.

He keeps calling him Zucks, and I'm going to fight, Rubin. I kind of like Zucks. Nope. I'm out on Zucks. I'm sorry I said it. Zucks is what Facebook has to call it's digital currency. So that is spoken for. Which is dead now.

So maybe it's good for this. It rhymes with, you know, great stuff. Fun fact, Kranz, Twitter did I actually come up with the word tweet? Yeah, no. The first popularization of that was Twitterrific, a third party client. Yeah, it was the Twitterrific guy was like, I need something to call it. Yeah. And so he called it Twit.

And it was a Twitter employee who was also a Twitterrific beta user who was like, hey, call them tweets. And he used it. And then like a year and a half later, Twitter was like, we also call them tweets. Yeah. Twitter, famous for taking all of its early good ideas from its third party developers, then it then killed in the cradle. Yeah.

And then never having any other good ideas ever again after that. Let's talk about the decentralization piece of this. Because this is like for me as an open social web believer, this is the thing I've been most looking forward to. And you've been reporting for months that this is a thing that, that Instagram was looking into for threats that it was going to interoperate with Activity Pub and the Massadon people have been up in arms. Of course. Yeah.

There's been a lot of feelings on the internet about what this thing was going to be before anybody knew what it was going to be. But it launched with no Fediverse anything yet. But Mouseri, in your talking to him, seemed to be more enthusiastic about activity pub than I even expected. Is that your read? Yeah. So I reported in Command Line last week, my newsletter, that they were,

telling big people in the Fediverse that they were going to delay activity pub integration into threads by several months. I have a feeling it may be later now. We could be talking six plus months just given how much threads is scaled beyond what they were initially expecting. They onboarded the entirety of the Fediverse to threads in like three hours. So give a sense of like the scale here. Yes, they have been meeting with large server admins, the CEO of Macedon himself, big third-party developers on Activity Pub for the last couple of weeks. To talk about this, they want to set up a roundtable of, you know, Fediverse leaders to kind of inform them as they try to integrate into the network. I was kind of surprised, I guess, though not entirely to hear Moseri say that he thinks this is the direction that the Internet is headed in, these decentralized platforms, which I know, David, your eyes must have gotten really huge when you saw that.

It's music to my ears, man. Yeah. Yeah. And for meta, of course, this is a creator thing where they think the pitch can be, if you're a creator and you build an audience on threads, if we decide to shut down threads like we did every other standalone app we've ever launched as a company that we didn't acquire, you'll at least be able to take everything with you to mastodon or to another activity pub client. That's at least the pitch, whether they follow through with that and that all works as planned remains to be seen. And there's obviously, you know, you should have plenty of skepticism with the largest centralized social media. media platform in the world saying it's going to embrace a decentralized protocol. I do think the fact that they're doing it with threads with a new app and not Instagram signals

that they're serious about this and in most areas retelling to me, they really can't retroactively embrace activity pub on an existing app that's at that kind of scale they needed to have something fresh. And it's pretty clear that he drove this. I was rewatching a TED talk he gave last year about this and about how creators will inevitably embrace these open protocols for a lot of these reasons. This is something he's been saying even before Threads was a twinkle and met his eye. I do think they're going to be met with extreme fierce backlash in the Fediverse. They know this. They're already getting this. I've been hearing from people in the Fediverse that you're supposed to just say Fediverse, not the Fediverse. I'm going to get a bunch of angry tweets about that.

People from Fediverse? No, I'm out on that. It's like Brooklyn. It's like a neighborhood. I'm all for it. I think activity pubs a great idea. I will say the early pro-powerful community on Fedaverse, y'all are a little too anal on your terms. Like, let's just loosen up a little bit. But yeah, there's no trust of meta here. I tend to side with John Gruber on if you're going to really say that this is an open protocol, you need to treat it as one and you need to let anyone come on and not just be already talking about blocking them. At least see what they're going to do. But I mean, that's like the beauty of Fedaverse. I'm trying to embrace it.

I hate that already. No. There's an article that should go there. That was awful. I didn't. It's like when Tim Cook says we, this is iPhone. Like, no. It's the, it's an iPhone.

It's the, it is the Fedaverse. Yeah, but this is like the point of the Fediverse is that if you don't like, if you go and you build a big audience on threads and it finally goes live and you don't like that you can't post boobies, you can go to a server where you can post boobies. Except the boobies will not be on threads. So what server has the biggest audience? It's going to be threads by a factor of mini-X. So do you care about, you know, censorship?

Do you care about distribution? You're going to have to make a choice. Threads for boobies. It's very clear. And of course, Meta knows this better than any other company, is that distribution trumps all. Yep. And I will say the earliest bull case for threads is that the notifications are just

popping off. Like I know Neli and others were talking about this when they first got on. I thought my phone was ringing last night. It's insane. I had to mute it instantly because it's got that Instagram graph built in, the day one distribution that you have on threads is just, it's so much more than Massadon. It's honestly more than Twitter these days. Like, there are eyeballs there. And as a creator on one of these platforms, when you're not getting paid by the platform, guess what?

You're going to want to use the platform with the biggest reach. And so meta knows this. And I think even when they hook into Activity Pub, they know they're going to be the server with the biggest reach. And so they're going to buy that very fact, be able to extend their policies, their way of doing things throughout the Fediverse. And that's, I think, what's really getting a lot of the other server admins worried is that all of a sudden this giant open protocol may be just governed by the Instagram content guidelines. Are they going to actually monetize threads? Like, Twitter was notoriously difficult to monetize. Yes.

For many reasons. I would say incompetence was up there. Is that really the play here? Or is it just like, this is our Goodwill project. Now you all like us. Go use Instagram and Facebook where we make our money. We're no longer in a zero interest rate environment, Alex Krantz. No, they're absolutely going to put ads in this thing.

I would say sooner than they had even expected, given the scale. This has met us playbook. they wait for something to have the kind of velocity that it could hit a billion users and then they do ads. I think Mosseri wants you to think that they're not interested in monetizing. He has said a couple of times. Like he keeps calling it a champagne problem. And it's like, well, no, this is either going to work and you're going to make money off of it or you're going to shut it down. Like there's no middle option where this thing continues to live without being monetized.

Yeah. They want to make sure the product sticky has good retention. They worry about retention. They kind of set the industry benchmark for retention and social. networks, they have the playbook that they invented that the rest of the industry follows for those. So they will use that playbook. They will add ads when it's at this nice kind of like self-circulating, self-building place. And yeah, it's going to look like Instagram in terms of that. I guess I just wonder how valuable that is because Twitter, in addition to being

terrible at monetizing, also was much smaller than a lot of these other ones, right? Like, it was way smaller than Facebook. It was way smaller than Instagram. And threads, even if it gets to Twitter size, is going to still be way smaller than the cash cows. Yeah, but you have to approach this as a marketer if it's another toggle. I can never do that. So walk me through it, please. Okay. I regrettably have to talk to these people for my job.

Sorry. No, I'm just kidding. I love marketers. Keep talking to me about the platforms, please. If it's another toggle in your dashboard when you're running an ad on Instagram to run it in threads and you can reach 100 to 300 million people on there, you're going to do it. It's zero cost to you. It's all upside. This is where the benefits of scale and graphs kind of coalescing at the plus billion mark is going to just keep giving meta kind of tremendous incumbent advantages with new products like this.

And they know that. This is why we're not seeing it in Europe yet, right? Because when you first hear about it and you hear about thread, you're like, well, this should go in Europe. Because I know they're afraid of the DMA. but that's the first thing you think of when you think of threads is this should go to europe always think of it threads seems very european to you we've been talking a lot like there's been a lot of noise today about how it's not in europe yet and that's that's that seems to be because the dama right like that's the fear is that that they can't do it because of the dama and what the dma says

is that like you you have to be kind of open and honest you have to like be good stewards and you need to let people take their followers where they want to go and all of this. And that's like, okay, that sounds like everything that thread does. And then I guess the other side of that is that also it's part of meta. And meta is huge and will inevitably swallow everything whole because when you're that big, that's just how you process everything. I just have one more thing to say on the monetization before we go, which is this is another place that it is very useful to be part of Instagram, which has a number of very good monetization

tools for creators that would lend themselves very well to a product like three. threads, things like gifts and subscriptions and the tip stuff they can do and shopping. Like, all that stuff is built and at scale and making huge amounts of money for lots of people and you can just stick it into threads without all that much work. I think the interface designers would have some work to do. I think the interface designers already have some work to do, which we can talk about if you guys would like to. But let's get into, I both want to talk about the Europe stuff.

And then I want to get to some of the questions that you got about threads on threads. Yeah. But first, let's take a break. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated AB testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing.

pages or migrate your full.com. Framer has programs for startups, scaleups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash verge for 30% off a Framer pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash verge for 30% of. off. Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication, and when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic, can be getting lost in the shuffle.

Grammally gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write, while giving you access to agents that help you sound natural and engaging. No matter, what kind of writing you're doing, Gramerly helps you get ideas done faster and move from draft to done with less friction. You can use Gramerly's AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft, then refine it with context-aware suggestions that fit what you're working on. See why 90% of professionals say Gramerly has saved them time writing and editing their work. In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Gramerly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's grammarly.com.

We're back. Let's talk about this Europe thing. I don't want to dwell on this for too long because it's boring policy, but it is worth explaining. And Heath, you talk to Moser's specifically about this. What is your sense of why this thing didn't launch in Europe? Yeah, so Threads is not available in the EU. I'm sorry to everyone in the French countryside on vacation right now. And according to Cranz, it's a very European app. So it's a real shame. It's very European. Everybody wants it.

You have to cry into your cheese and your wine. But that does leave out a market of, you know, hundreds of millions of people. It's a huge missed market opportunity for threads initially, and they know this. This is a really interesting example of what the EU is doing regulation-wise with big tech. They have the Digital Markets Act, which is going into effect next year. And it labels meta and other big companies like Apple and Google as gatekeepers. and with that distinction comes a whole new host of compliance requirements that if are not met, result in insane fines. Like, not just like your one-off fines that these companies happily pay, but debilitating fines.

Which is the way fines should actually function. Sure. Sure. They should discourage whatever the things you're not supposed to do from doing. Yes, no, I agree. Fines should be proportional to the company size. Yeah, they've been parking tickets so far. This is not, you know, meta's not alone here.

I've heard people at Apple, Google are also freaking out about how to comply with the DMA. There's a lot of unknowns. There's a bunch of interoperability standards. There's self-preferencing standards that have to be met. I think with threads in particular, they're worried about being compliant with the data sharing and the data leakage between threads and the rest of meta. Since threads is this quasi-separate thing, but it still is connected to Instagram. It has its own terms of service, but it also has, you know, meta influence, meta-content guidelines. They're definitely going to be sharing that data. And basically, whatever meta tests

to how they operate this, they are very much liable to that attestation being accurate under the new DMA. And if not, they're going to get fined. And not only that, they have to be able to prove it, like, aggressively and constantly. And that was one of the things most areas said that I thought was really interesting, is that, like, the tooling just to be able to document this stuff is a huge amount of work. Yeah, it's a huge amount of work. This is one of the companies with perhaps the strongest global, if not one of the strongest global lobbying policy presences in the world. They've had more headroom on this than anyone. And they, I think it's very interesting that they don't feel confident to launch what they think could be the fastest growing

software products since Chad GPT in Europe, even though the DMA does not go into effect until maybe spring of next year because they're that worried about potentially being liable. I think this means that other big product launches like this will also not go into the EU region initially as well. I don't think this will be the only one. They do really want to get into the EU. I just think it's going to take several months at minimum before they can make sure that they can hold up to their, you know, attestations of how they're using the data. So kind of like video games going to Australia, where they always have to wait forever because there's all the Australian regulation and they're like, okay, now I get to kill everybody. Or China as in, you know, China's an even more stringent example. Well, and again, in this particular case, Instagram was in such a rush to get this out. It was, it's so clearly sensed a moment to do this. Yeah. That it made what seems like sort of a calculated decision to say, this is a problem we could not solve by July 5th. So our option was either don't launch on July 5th or don't launch in the EU.

And I think they just picked that. Yeah. Moseeri was very clear to me and others that they felt they had a very narrow window to launch this thing to really capitalize on the Twitter turmoil. and they didn't want to miss that window. And their instinct was probably right there as hard as it is to not have a massive market that can use the app. What do you guys think about that? Do you, I mean, I think there's a lot of people. We've had people in our Slack that are a little more sympathetic to the EU here versus, you know, meta.

Obviously, meta doesn't have a great track record with privacy. People think that, you know, what the EU is doing is generally good. I don't really know. I haven't formed a full opinion on that. I think GDPR has been widely considered a disaster and did not actually make the Internet more private. And if anything, just kind of solidified incumbents who could pay for the internal tooling and all of that to... You get to click a little button. Yeah, sure.

Every time you go to a new website, you click that button. Do you feel like your data is more protected because of that button? No, I feel like I'm annoyed. I have to click the button. Yeah. You know, the last big sweeping regulation was that pop up that the EU gave us. And I haven't seen any independent analysis that what the DMA is proposing will result in anything substantially better. I hope it will. I think these gatekeepers need to have more incentives to allow for competition.

It's just very tough to craft this kind of regulation, very tough. They're trying to cover a lot of different companies with one law. And like every one of these companies is very different. They all have different goals. They all have different, like, size of customer bases. the different stuff that they do really, really poorly that destroys our privacy. There's not a lot of consistency there. And I think it makes sense that META said, no, we're not going to go in there.

We're not going to challenge this right now. We are going to acknowledge it. I think that feels like it's working exactly how it's intended. And hopefully European users don't get mad and be like, well, we just should get rid of this law so I can have, give meta my data. And I'm sure meta would love it if all the users rose up and were like, give us, give us threats. But I'm like, I think this is working exactly how it's intended. And I wish other countries would be thinking more about legislating this stuff, not necessarily in the DMA way, because I don't know enough about it to like have a really strong opinion on it

beyond it sounds nice at like first glance. And like, I would love more legislation that sounds nice and actually works and actually provides fines that are meaningful and do things like, like, I think that's working great. The fact that Meta looked at it and was like, I don't want to risk the fines. I want to figure out and make sure that we're complying with this law. Like, that's wonderful. That's working exactly how it's intended. And that's great. Yeah, I tend to agree. I think if I'm the European Commission and the folks who wrote the DMA, they're probably thrilled that this is how it went down because a big part of the goal is to make these companies sit down and think about the consequences of their actions. And I think the challenge for a lot of

these regulators is that they've always been somewhere between like one and 65 steps behind the tech industry. They're regulating and litigating old problems while all these other companies are out talking about like crypto and AI. And then they skip right past privacy and try to regulate AI and they will have moved on to something else. And the DMA basically swung such a big hammer that it was like, okay, we're going to stop everybody for a minute. And I think this seems like from what I've heard from folks, the kind of policy that is going to play out really slowly over time and is only going to be sort of answered as it gets litigated. And questions about like, who is a gatekeeper and what does that mean? And how do we decide who has that power and who doesn't like that stuff is going to take a while to really shake out?

But I think just the fact that it made meta take its time on this, I think they're going to see as a big victory. And again, this is kind of an unusual situation in that they didn't have. have time to iron out some of the policy issues for a global launch. The question for me will be whether that becomes the thing, like you're talking about, if the move becomes these companies take longer to launch their global products as a result of trying to get the regulation rate versus everybody launches everything and then launches it a year later in the EU when they can figure out how to do the paperwork correctly. I have no idea which one of those is going to play out, but one of those is going to be politically significantly less popular among European people

than the other. People really want their tech and their services and especially things like networks that have a global kind of utility to them. And I'm very curious to see if the EU gets blowback in that regard. I just keep thinking about all the Instagram users. Like there's a thing on your Instagram badge now that shows what number user you were on threads. And I bet you there is a not insubstantial number of people in the EU who are pissed at how high their number is going to be. Maybe they'll give them like a special one. Like they have their their official thread number and then their EU thread number. Oh, that's that's fun. I like that. So that way they can still have a little bragging rights, but not as much as Heath.

I want to get into threads reader questions, but I also quickly, I want to address, I've just seen a lot of commentary on this and have been asked this directly. Why didn't ask Missouri about this? People have been pointing to the app store privacy labels for threads and all of the data they collect. And we could talk, we should actually do like a, what has been the impact of Apple's privacy labels in the App Store segment at some point. There's a lot to unpack here. Newsflash, they have not really worked and they don't actually mean anything. I was just going to say, I actually think there's nothing to unpack here. I think the answer is it's basically security theater. I think the simplest thing we can say now is that if you already use Instagram, if you are

Instagram user, you have absolutely no reason to be complaining or saying you're not signing up for threads because of these privacy labels. You're already using Instagram, which is governed under the exact same data policy as threads. So that's my short answer. We should absolutely talk more about privacy labels and maybe talk to some developers who have gone through it later, but I just wanted to get that out of the way. That's exactly right. And I think the argument of is this company collecting way too much data on you is the answer is yes, right? Like, Neel I posted in Slack, he got a thing from threads asking to connect to other devices on his local network, which is like insane, right? Like this app wants everything you will give it, including like your health and fitness information.

But if you've ever used a meta app, you're already giving it that information. Yeah. This is not a new problem. If you're mad, it's still about meta's data collection. Like save like 10% of that anger for the data brokers who literally actually sell your data to companies without your knowledge that are completely. completely unregulated still in the U.S. because they so effectively lobby the government. They're terrifying. Direct a little bit of anger towards that versus meta, and we may actually, actually, you know, solve a lot of these problems. Were those the brokers that, like, the NSA and CIA revealed a couple of weeks ago that they were buying data from? They're like, oh, yeah, we buy it from them already.

We're veering dangerously close to me giving a long rant about how Cambridge Analytica was a fake made-up scandal that actually had nothing to do with anything. So I'm here for it. Let's just, let's save that for another day. Heath, you ask on threads for people to ask you threads questions for us to answer on the Vergecast. Let's do a bunch of them. What do you got? Yeah, so this is a great one. I'm really curious what you guys think about this.

Do you think the discourse can be different here on threads than on Twitter? Or will the format eventually produce the same results, aka hate, speech, bullying, dunking, all that stuff? I think the format will definitely produce a lot of similar results. but the fact that we're getting the Instagram aggressive moderation might mitigate some of that. I think that's right. I mean, I think the thing that we've seen is that these platforms develop different norms really fast, right? Like, Mastodon is different from Twitter, which is different from Blue Sky, which is different from, I don't know, telegram. Like these things where people send text to one another do develop different cultures. I think threads absolutely risks basically turning into Twitter and in a lot of ways and for a lot of people will.

I also think a lot of people's Twitter experiences were sort of self-inflicted. I think who you decided to follow and engage with and what you decided to share. Like if you just went on and talked about NBA, you had a very different version of Twitter than people who yelled about politics all day, right? And I think to some extent, just having a sort of forced experience of starting over goes a really long way. And I think just that alone is going to change versions of the discourse. But are there going to be similarly horrible political fights? And are there going to be main characters on threads who just get ruthlessly harassed until something horrible happens? Like, yeah, it's going to happen.

Are you guys changing how you use threads versus Twitter? Like consciously. Because for me, I definitely have like a different approach. I'm like, okay, I learned Twitter was where's where I could, like, kind of stumble along. Say more. What are you doing differently with threads? I'm being more thoughtful about it. Like, I'm being more thoughtful about what I post.

And, like, I have the urge to post all sorts of horrible shit posting. And I usually do on Twitter. And I'm like, maybe, maybe I don't on threads. Maybe a bunch of people don't want to hear these thoughts about tow hairs. And I think they all should. But people on Twitter super did. They didn't. They didn't.

That sounds like a Tumblr thing, France. That was really a Tumblr thing. I miss took the audience. But I think that the audience feels clearer, at least in these early days, a thread of like what you can do and kind of how mean you can get, how weird you can get. You always want to like scale it back just a little bit. Don't get too mean. Don't get too weird. And David, I think your point about, you know, the opportunity to start over as a big one is totally spot on.

And I think the early culture of these networks create matters, as we've seen with Blue Sky already, for example, and Massadon. a different way. I do want to just check our like white man privilege of like using these platforms. I do think because of the public nature of Twitter and threads, if you are a minority or someone who is easily targetable, unfortunately, on the internet, you have a wildly different experience with these public platforms. And you don't, it doesn't matter who you follow like it comes to you. Like I've seen enough examples. The mansplaining still appears in my, in like my, my, my threats. And that's coming to threat. It's, it really is.

It's already there. It started last night, like, almost immediately. Somebody was like, let me tell you what you're saying. And I'm like, no, I said it. And Cranes, be honest, like, the mansplaining is probably the best of the worst, you know? Like, there's actually, there's far worse. Yeah, like, this was, this was like fairly mild mansplaining. I've definitely had it way worse. And I'm sure it's just going to come.

And I think that's just, like, I think most people who go online and simply exist and people get mad at them, which is a lot of us, unfortunately. Unfortunately, we're kind of accustomed to it by now. It sucks and it shouldn't happen and there should be tools and stuff. But I think that's a hard problem to figure out how you do those tools, how you balance them, and don't turn into whatever happened to Facebook in 2016. You just kind of have to, I mean, this is me saying it as an old haggard witch of a woman who's been on the internet a very long time. You kind of get used to it. You kind of learn to like what stuff to ignore and what stuff to report. You shouldn't get used to it.

Like these platforms should do better. Yeah, you shouldn't, but like... But yes, I know what you mean. That's a hard, like something like mansplaining, like, how are you going to report somebody for being like, they think they know more than me? Moderator, fix it. Yeah, totally. Well, that's not going to work.

It's just going to be like, well, yeah, I'm just not going to engage with you. And at Twitter, I probably would have engaged a few times, right? Like, I probably would have been like, let me explain things to you. Let me be optimistic or eat shit asshole. And here I'm like, I've done this before. I see you. And I'm just not going to feed the troll. I will say it was comforting to see that threads had,

basic moderation things like blocking and muting built in on day one. Oh, I've already blocked somebody. It was great. I was like, beautiful. You can DM me and I'll tell you who I blocked, but I'm going to say it here. So optimistic but cautious and we should definitely check back in on this. I thought it was a good question. Next one, should we expect a high velocity of new feature additions? And would that even be possible under the regulatory scrutiny that Facebook is correctly subject to? We kind of already touched on the regulatory scrutiny, I do think there's going to be a high velocity of feature tweaks and changes to this product, especially now that it has garnered so much attention that exceeded Meadows' wildest dreams.

And what happens in these big companies is that these projects start as like small resource constrained things. Threads has like a few dozen people working on it. And when they see that it's working, a bunch more people want to work on it. A bunch of resources get thrown on it. Zuckerberg himself is very excited about it now. So I expect that the team building it. will swell and they'll ship a lot faster. I already know, for example, like the internal employee build lets you do things like tap on a profile and it expands to see it in full. Like they're already making a bunch of like small tweaks on the edges that will ship soon.

And then, yeah, Missouri's already confirmed a following only list is in the works. He has told me in others that they don't plan to do DMs. I have a feeling they'll go back on that after they see how much of a loop, a powerful loop that is. At the very least, they need to make it easier to share the, ads to like Instagram DMs, for example, or just other DM apps. That could be a lot smoother. And they know that. Let me shit talk in peace.

Yeah. Any features you guys want to see like quickly? Better search is, I think, the biggest one. And something that the company is relatively good at. So I suspect that's coming. But what I think it's going to be really interesting is to see how much they want to do here. Because I think one of the things that is true is that it is simple and that's part of what is good about it. also he most serious said this to you he that instagram the app is bloated and messy and too much and they're

actually in the and this is like this whole company goes through this constantly right they add a million things to the app and then they go oh my god this app is a mess and then they get rid of some stuff and simplify and then they add a bunch more stuff and this is just like this is the meta pendulum swing at all times and they're in a sort of simplification phase right now and i think also part of what has appealed to people about threads already is that it's very strong straightforward and it works. And so I think the idea that they're going to be like, now you can make a podcast inside of threads is like they'd be stupid to think that that is the answer, right? And so I think what we're going to see is them try to figure out what is smart to take from Twitter and what is

like actually not what makes the platform work. And I suspect we'll get a lot of stuff really fast. I think you're right because this team is actually just in a position to ship really fast. Like building stuff just inside the org structure of something like Instagram and Facebook is hard and takes a long time and a lot of people. And this is a team that just can make things. And now has like a big win under a tat and it's going to be able to make things faster. They have Jane Wong. Yeah, they got Jane Wong.

Legendary app scooper Jane Wong, which means she probably won't be posting her app dumps anymore, which is a huge bummer. Or they just hired her to be Threads exclusive, which, would be a super cool move. She's literally working on threads. She's a meta employee now. It's pretty wild. Okay, this is a good one too.

How will journalists and other people who provide real-time important info be able to be verified so users know the info being posted is legitimate? We've obviously seen how this has played out on Twitter since Elon changed the check marks. I am verified on Instagram because a media brand I worked out in 2015 had a social media manager who knew someone at Facebook got everyone verified in the newsroom.

That's how I got verified on Twitter. Anyone who's worked in a newsroom long enough knows that that's how it worked up until like a couple years ago. Meta has a paid verified program now. So I think they are phasing out the unique have to know somebody to get a checkmark. They're going to let people who got that checkmark keep it. So thanks meta. But yes, I think going forward, Meadow will tell me if I'm wrong, but you need to pay to be verified on Instagram. They actually, I believe, ID check you.

So I think there's a level of actual verification. Yeah. So I cannot make a Nilai Berder account. Well, you can try. I mean. I will try. We should try. I'm going to wait until he's back on the show to do it.

Yeah. But there is a level of actual scrutiny of someone's identity when you become verified on Instagram that far exceeds what Twitter is doing currently. So if you see a checkmark on threads, it's the real deal. Don't hold me to that, though. I don't want to be sued. But yeah, how do we feel about this? the checkmark thing with threads.

I didn't know you could pay. That seems... Yeah. It's basically like Twitter in that they're trying to get away from the checkmark means... You're special. Yeah, special. Yeah. Which is honestly the only reason I ever liked the check mark.

I love, like, very visual ways to validate myself. Thank you. But meta is at least trying to make sure that not everyone demands a blue check. But, yeah, meta's actually checking, whereas, like, Twitter's thing was like, like, oh, you have a credit card, you're in. And so that's good. Like, I think that's actually how it should work. Not necessarily that you should have to pay,

but that, like, they are actually checking and making sure that the person is the person. Like, that's great. Go for it. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think part of me wonders if the whole idea of the blue check is just being sort of beaten out of usefulness. Twitter kind of bastardized what it means. Tumblr would just, like, sell you one as a joke, which I think. thought was very funny and still love very much.

By 20 if you want. Yeah. And so I kind of wonder if we're at a point where we're going to need some other connotation of this person is who they say they are. And to some extent, being connected to Instagram is useful in that way because there are just more tools to verify people on Instagram than there are on threads or Twitter at this moment. And so I think having those connections might be useful.

But I don't know. I continue to wonder if any kind of check is going to mean much to people for very long. At some point, I feel like it's just going to be a little thing you kind of look over and you're like, oh, that person's really who they say they are. Oh, that's a parody account. Oh, that's just somebody who's too lazy or, you know, a brand or something. I hope so. I think at some point we'll get that and that'd be great. But different way of working on the internet. This is also, I would point out a potential upside of the Fediverse is this becomes a thing that not every platform has to do for itself, that we can have bigger, broader cross-system tools for. for verifying people that actually make a lot more sense.

Oh, my God. That's going to be the first big fight between Meta and the Fediverse. I think one of my great conspiracy theories about threads and activity pub in general is that meta actually has no interest in doing things like that and only does it out of basically obligation because it runs the platform. Meta doesn't care all that much about your content. Your content is just annoying for meta, generally speaking. It wants your activity.

It wants you to be paying attention. It wants you to be on its platform. but it didn't really give a shit what your posts are. It just wants you to like hang out. So giving you a feeling that your posts are yours and someone else can deal with all the hard work of doing something like verifying that you are who you say you are, but you can just use threads because it's a better app. They can just focus on making a good app and all the stuff you do around it doesn't have to be their problem anymore. I actually think that's an enormous win for meta down the road. I think you're right.

Okay, one last question and then maybe we can call Nelai, TBD. will there be third-party API platform integration for other developers on threads? I highly, highly doubt it because Meta as a company, their last time they tried to do a developer platform, it resulted in Cambridge Analytica. So they have decided as a company. Jesus, when you say it like that. They could do it again. They didn't do a very good job at a time. You see, Mark Zuckerberg's still running the company.

I think he remembers those Senate hearings and the lawsuits and the fines, the record fines. But he took the wrong thing from that. Instead of being like, oh, I shouldn't collect as much data, he was like, I guess that means no third party apps. Oh, is this really, David's tease this. Are we really going to have to explain to Cambridge Analytica? No, I'm not doing this. No. Cambridge Analytica was not about your data. It was because Facebook let third party developers use your data in ways they shouldn't have. Okay. End of story. Go watch the documentary, the great hack. It gets almost everything wrong. No, quickly, just to summarize, no, I do not think they will do a third-party platform because of that. It's probably a good idea. I would say it's at the very, very end of their to-do list and probably something that their senior leadership does actually just not want to do at all. So, sorry. But it's a good idea, but no. I think that's right. My question would be, Heath, on that respect, I think, because I can't stop talking about

activity pub, one of the things Mossery has said a couple of times is that part of the upside of activity pub is you can support the standard and kind of be part of the ecosystem, but you can also build threads only stuff just inside of the app. So what I wonder is less like, do they want to support developers and more do you think they'll go the road of like, I would call it like the I message thing, right? Where it's like you can send SMS through I message, but if you're I message to I message, you get this whole universe of other stuff you can do. Is that where threads ends?

That's totally where it's going. And it's so ironic given that meta spends all its time shitting on eye message whenever it gets a chance in ads and in interviews. But yeah, threads will be the blue bubble of the Fedaverse. And we're all going to have to live with that. That's good. That's good. Yeah. I like that.

You just made all the Fediverse green bubbles so mad. Get at me with your toots, guys. Okay. Those are reader questions. What's next? Can we talk about the Twitter response just for a couple of minutes before we throw to another break? Yeah. It got more aggressive over the 24 hours.

But basically the first response from Twitter, well, let me just read you the tweets, both from Elon Musk and from Linda Yakerino, the CEO. So Elon Musk said, it is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter than indulge in the false happiness of hide the pain in Instagram. That's what Elon Musk said. And like, what does that mean? That's a sentence. What? Sure. And then the CEO, Lindiacorina, said, we're often imitated, but the Twitter community can never be

duplicated. That is a much better line and a much better selling point, I would argue. And I think is going to be the thing, right? And like, even Messeria said this to you a couple of times, Alex. He's like going way out of his way to give Twitter credit for like pioneering the format, which I think you could make a strong case. It didn't really do that like there are things that look like Twitter before Twitter. But also that it is a big community full of engaged people and that's actually a hard thing to unseat and even if threads works it probably won't kill Twitter. Both of those read a lot like, I'm not scared, I'm not scared, I'm not scared, don't tell everybody I was scared responses, right? Is that what you guys take from this? Okay.

Pretty much. Okay. Yes. Cool. And then just to prove it's not scared, Twitter also threatened to sue Instagram over threads. Heath, you were looking at this just before we started recording. Do you want to explain what we know? Oh my God. I was just reading it while you were saying that. So this is Alex Spiro, must personal lawyer, who has also been taking point on them not paying rents, et cetera. This whole letter is hilarious, but it's to Zuckerberg. And the part that I think is super relevant is that over the past year, META has hired dozens of former employees. Twitter knows that these employees previously worked at Twitter, that these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter's trade secrets and other highly confidential information, that these employees owe

ongoing obligations to Twitter and that many of these employees have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices. That sounds like your problem, Alex Spiro. With that knowledge, META deliberately assigned these employees to develop in a matter of months, META's copycat app with the specific intent that they use Twitter's trade secrets, et cetera, and violation of law, et cetera. So this is, I guess, some vague threat of like a IP, software IP property rights lawsuit, which hate to break it to you, Mosque and Ox Spiro,

but if there's any company that has researched the actual legal grounds for successfully winning a case on copying software, it is meta, considering they have copied more software than any social media company to date in a cumulative. Yeah, I think if Snap couldn't win a lawsuit, Twitter's probably not going to win a lawsuit. Yeah. This is the part of the show where if we had Nelai,

he would be going on a rant about the state of copyright law in America. Thank God he's not here. Thank God he's not. But it's not really a copyright thing. It's very much like a trade secrets from employees thing, which is... I guess. And again, the irony of that is like, remember when Elon Musk took over Twitter and promptly fired more than half the company? You're going to have a hard time proving it.

If you fired everybody, you didn't do any due diligence to recover everything from them because you fired them so quickly. And like, you have to prove what trade secrets that they're using, which is pretty, in this particular case, probably going to be pretty hard to do unless they're like in Slack saying LMM. I'm using this. I'm just going to copy, paste this stuff we used on Twitter, which hopefully they didn't do, but they might have. Oh, and here we go. Andy Stone, a meta spokesperson has already, this is so great. We're already seeing now. So when meta people, they finally have a place to respond to tweets that isn't Twitter. He threaded it? I just got set a thread for Andy Stone responding to this letter saying, to be clear, no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee.

That's just not a thing. Oh, that's great. So, yeah, I honestly, like, I should have said this earlier, but a huge part of threads and why Metis so excited about this is that Mark Zuckerberg and all their execs finally have a place to post Twitter-like content that isn't Twitter. I loved that, like, his first tweet in 11 years was Zuckerberg posting the Spider-Man pointing meme. Unbelievable.

Unbelievable. The best possible thing he could have tweeted. I was so impressed by that. We're going to enter this hole as a reporter. It's just like I'm going to have to be checking Twitter for the Twitter response to the story and then threads for the matter response, whatever. This is the new world we live in. Which one is getting more engagement?

That's a good question. I'll have to report back on that. To that point, my one request, Adam Messary, if you're listening, and I know that you are, build a web app. I'm sure you're going to do it first. I don't want to have to spend all day at work looking at my phone. I'm using my phone as my webcam right now. I can't be on threads.

Come on. Help it out. Help me out. Well, David, to be fair, you can open threads on web. If there's a lot of replies, it cuts off and tells you to get into the app, but you can at least see them on the web. I'm just going to go guess thread URLs and see if there are any sick posts at whatever URL at that time.

It's going to be amazing. All right. We need to take one more break. But before we do, Nelai is pinging me in Slack and apparently just landed and has some deep thoughts about threads he would like to share. So we're going to call him up. I think he's at baggage claim and hear what he has to say. Where in the world are you, Nilai Patel?

I'm at the airport with Mags. Can you say hi, bags? Hi. We're waiting for our bags. But I need to react to Instagram threads in a very deep, meaningful way, like a spiritual way, which is why I'm calling you from there to force my way onto the show. That's correct. So we've spent a long time on this podcast talking about threads already.

But you, I want to know because you are the guy who has been on this show specifically saying things like, I don't want feed-based social media in my life. And then you just showed up guns blazing on threads. What's going on here? It's like six posts in a day already. I'm off the wagon, man. We're drinking straight from the hose. You're smoking again. It's two things.

One, you know, I missed it. It's fun to post on a new social network in that vibe. You know, I post on Blue Sky a little bit. I tuted on, mastodon. but here I think the activity pub integration that meta is promising is actually really interesting. In a way that I don't know if the ATE protocol from Blue Sky will be successful, or maybe it will be, but I can just see a world in which having a presence on a large decentralized social platform can connect directly to our work and what we do.

And I think that's really exciting. And I'd rather be invested in that sort of opportunity than just building on someone else's close platform yet again. What do you make of, like, the app itself? Heath and Cranza and I didn't talk that much about, like, the actual mechanics of using the app. I kind of think it works, but I kind of think it's like hideously ugly. What's your sense?

It's a little bit ugly. Right? Yeah, it's a little bit ugly. Why are the share button so big? I don't understand. The button for reply and the button for whatever, the paper airplane, I'm just confused. I don't know what's going on at the bottom of your post. I think they know some of it isn't there and needs to be improved.

It's just, it's hard to know how much this version you have to take seriously right at the second. It's a very minimum viable product and it shows. Yes. They clearly rushed this out because of Twitter's rate limits. But I will say this. I posted that the embeds were a little bit broken because we wanted to put thread embeds in our stories and QuickBost and the feed and all the stuff. And like three different meta engineers, including the person who wrote the embed product, replied to me. And then they fixed it.

And that's just like the most fun you can have. It's everyone's building things together and talking about the products in earnest. And that's the fun part of making the internet. I keep saying the internet feels like 2011 again. And that's the part I really like and the part that I want back. Totally. And it feels, I mean, in a funny way, it feels like if you go back to that era, that's like the early Instagram era where all of this stuff was being built the first time

before it was a giant monolith that was hard to ship new stuff into. before everything that changed got rolled out in tiny little doses. This, they're just back to, like, building it live right in front of us, which I agree is, is fun and different and feels really different from meta. I wasn't sure meta, like, had the muscle to be this kind of company anymore. Yeah, I think the same thing. I think they're excited. The energy is, like, palpable.

They have skyrocketing user growth again. I also just keep letting how bad it must be in the, like, reality labs and Horizon Worlds division, where they're just trying to brute force the next version of like the metaverse internet into existence. And they're just like alone in their headsets while Zuck is a conquering hero, like posting Spider-Man memes. Maybe the answer was much simpler than they thought. Yes. I do think it's going to be interesting to see how the vibes shift in like week two of this, right? Because right now it's very exciting.

It's kind of amazing that it works as well as it does. But I think the question of like, where are we going to be seven days from now when? opening this thing is less exciting is going to be really interesting. And we've seen this a few times where it feels really cool and everybody like is this is this thing going to be be real or is this going to be something more meaningful? I think it just comes down to does it send anybody any traffic? Like they did the growth hackiest growth hacky thing, which is just always buzzing at you if you have notifications on. So the platform just feels alive because it's constantly sending you notifications. I actually turn them up like too much. This is everything I did not want about

feed-based social media. But then even when you have them off, when you have the app open, it still buzzes at you whenever you get a reply or notification. And that's like pretty good. Like they built a good feedback loop in there. And I think that's going to carry them, especially if the pace of sign-ups continues to just accelerate like we've seen. Totally. All right. Well, before you go, I know you have more bags to pick up and traveling to do. One of the last things we talked about before we got on with you was, I don't know if you saw this while you're on the plane, but Twitter is threatening to sue Instagram for essentially ripping off the app. They're saying they, you know, hired a bunch of people with devices and

trade secrets and they came and built a copycat app. I would just like to hear lawyer Nelai's initial impression of whether this is anything and the extent to which this is nothing. Yeah, it's the saddest shit I've ever read, man. What are they even complaining about? Twitter's trade secrets? What are Twitter's trade secrets? Twitter's IP stack is basically nothing. And then on top of that, Twitter promised ages ago to never use its patents offensively. I actually wrote a big story in 2013 about this thing called the innovator's patent agreement, the IPA. It was a big Twitter initiative where they agreed to never use their patents against anyone except defensively. And they try to get everyone else to agree to it as well.

So, like, they got nothing except quote unquote trade secrets and like, good luck. If I'm Quinn Emanuel, like Elon's law firm, I would be totally embarrassed by this desperate letter. They should have definitely told him not to do this. There you go. All right, go get your bags. Thank you for coming on. I suspect we will have more chances to talk about threats very, very, very soon. All right, nice. You say goodbye. Bye, Max. We're out of here. All right. And with that, we need to actually take a break. And then we're going to come back and do a lightning round. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But What Not flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love.

On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you've got, ask questions, and buy. And they keep coming back. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, and yes, even cookies, sellers are building real thriving businesses. And for a limited time, What Not says they'll match your first $150 sold in the first month. You can visit Whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. What-N-O-T-com slash sell.

Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough.

It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud.

cloud. a. a. slash vergecast. That's clod.a.ai slash vergecast. And check out Claude pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash verge cast. All right, we're back. Let's stop with threads for a minute. And let's do, let's do a little bit of a lightning round, because it is July. So, like, news is slow. And news is going to be slow for a little while because everybody's on vacation for the next several weeks. Have you guys already started getting, like, the increase in out-of-office responses from people. Mine has definitely spiked the last few days. No, I aggressively work hard to not email people ever.

It's not going well, but it's going well enough that I haven't gotten any yet. I respect that. Just carrier pigeons or nothing. Let's do a little bit of lightning round. The only rule for this lightning round is you can pick anything you want to talk about this week, except threads. Threads is off limits. Kranz, you get to go first. What do you got?

Okay. So we're going to talk about Daddy's Aslov. one of my favorite people on the planet. Who has had quite a week that been. He has had quite a week. Should we go into all of it? There's a few. Just give us the quick rundown because there's a bunch of stuff happening simultaneously here.

Okay. Here's the quick rundown. About two weeks ago, Turner Classic movies lost a lot of employees. People were very upset, particularly a lot of, like, big fans of old Hollywood movies, like Steven Spielberg and Scorsese and Wes Anderson, and they all complained. And Zazlov was eventually like, okay, but you guys can come and help us and be a part of this. And we won't fire everyone at Turner Classic Movies. And you guys can like help us choose movies.

And so that happened and everybody seemed to settle. There was much joy in the kingdom. As much joys can happen in the kingdom of Zaslov. Yeah. Picking a fight with Turner Classic movies, by the way, weird move. Weird. Well, and also he allegedly loves classic films. Like he's a big fan of them.

He's a huge fan of Turner Classic movie. Yeah, but you know what he likes more, Alex? It's tax breaks. Yeah, exactly. He was like, I love him, but I love tax breaks more. And they came and were like, yeah, but do you ever want to work with any of us again? And he's like, I do. So never mind.

Tax breaks. Backseat. So then over the weekend, GQ published a story that talked a lot about this, but also talked about the fact that Sazlov, is it exactly known for like his film taste? He's a guy who did like the 27 kids in counting or whatever it's called. He did a lot of reality show, a lot of reality TV that a lot of people consider trashy. They don't like it. And this GQ article really took him to task for that.

And the fact that he was that guy and now he's out here running one of the largest movie studios in the world. And then the story disappeared. Well, first it got aggressively edited. It came back aggressively edited, but with no byline on it. And then it totally disappeared. And it turns out that someone on Zazlov's camp reached out to GQ and were like, this is really mean. And to be fair, it was a very mean article. But as far as we know, didn't say anything that lots of people were not already saying publicly.

Yeah, there was nothing inaccurate in it. It was a lot of opinion. And that opinion was you suck. It was not that bad. Like, this is what you're going to have your PR person try to spike. Yeah. So it sounds like what happened was that they reached out with a. whole list of things. And PR does this a lot where they really just like a story, but there's

nothing actually inaccurate. So they just have a bunch of things to like be like, well, but you could have also said that he loves babies. Why didn't you talk about how he loves babies? And people at GQ, they pulled the story. There's a lot of upset folks. It turns out that the, the EIC of GQ is also producing a film that's being made at Warner Brothers. Everybody looks terrifically stupid in this situation. Zazlov just looks really, really thin-skinned, and he is still in negotiations with both SAG and the WGA with all the other producers in Hollywood right now. So probably not a great time to look really thin-skinned and like you hate the movies

and people. And also, like, truly excellent Streisand effect example of taking a GQ story that I had not heard about or seen, and no one really paid that much attention to, and turning it into like front page news all over the internet. I didn't read it until it had already been pulled. And then I was like, oh, this is what you went after? Thank you to the Google Cash for providing that. I got to be, I got to be meaner in my own stories about Warner Brothers now. So, let's see what can happen. Yeah, big week for Davis-as-law. Heath, have you picked one yet, or do you want me to go while you look? Yeah, I have one. We wrote about this. West Davis wrote

about this on the site. The TSA is going to be expanding its use of facial recognition to over 400 airports. They claim a 97% effectiveness rate on the 25 airport pilot program they've been using so far. This is just a bad idea. Can we just say beyond a shot of a doubt that like we should not be given the TSA our faces? TSA shouldn't have anything. They shouldn't have funding. Also, 97% success rate on this is not impressive. No, it's not. Our security system misses three out of a hundred people. It's like, not good. Like I've seen these things and I'm sure other people have going through TSA. Like I see it LAX and I've seen it in New York, obviously, like, avoid it at all costs. I really hope this stays opt-in. They should not mandate this. There is no federal privacy law about facial recognition data.

There's no law that stipulates how the U.S. government uses this data. TSA claims they delete it. I do not believe them. I think we have, we can be skeptical of the data practices of private for-profit corporations that we choose to use all the time. I'm not saying that that's bad. We should absolutely be way more skeptical and concerned about government agencies using our personal and face data. And so this is a giant thumbs down for me. The TSA sucks. And they should not use our face data. Well, someone's going to get a really good look in his bag next time you flies.

Yeah. You just made a list somewhere for sure. I'm definitely on the list now. Whatever. I've got global entries. Stop me, bitches. Clear, bitches. Yeah.

I love it. All right. Mine is Google, you may have heard of it, changed its privacy policy to say that it uses publicly scraped web data to train things like Bard and Cloud AI. I believe those are the two things that added to the privacy policy. This is one of those things that, like, everybody already knew, and Google is sort of retroactively being like, no trust us. It's super cool that we do this. It's no problem. Don't worry about it at all.

And this sparked like a minor uproar because it had a lot of people asking questions about like, okay, is Google using my Google Docs to train AI models? I believe the answer is no because that doesn't actually count as a thing on the public web, but I'm sure that's complicated if you like make it a public link. Like, who knows? All this stuff is a mess. And the response to it, like updating your privacy policy is one of those things you do when you hope no one will notice because who reads privacy policies. mercifully, there are people in the internet who have it set up so that when Google changes

privacy policy, you get an email about it. Love those tools. Congratulations, everybody. But I think this is the kind of thing. There are just going to be a lot of moments like this in the immediate future. And there are a lot of questions about what it means that all of this is happening and what it means for you as a person that none of these companies are doing a good job of communicating. Obviously, none of this is regulated in any kind of meaningful way yet. And it's going to keep sparking all of these fights about all of these companies. Like, we went through this with the social networks. Do you guys remember?

I think it was Instagram actually changed its privacy policy a bunch of years ago that it was like, we can use your images in marketing materials or everything. And everybody's like, wait, what? You're going to use my photos in an Instagram ad. And Instagram was like, why would we do that? That's ridiculous. We need it to be able to, like, propagate your image across our services. And this stuff, people just don't understand how this stuff works.

And they shouldn't have to. And we are reaching a point with all the AI stuff again where it's going to get real scary. There's going to be a lot of, like, fud out there as people panic about it. And it's just going to get real messy. And I'm not looking forward to it. Well, it was really weird for people to be upset about the scraping in this case because, like, that's literally Google's business. Google's business has always been to scrape the internet and monetize what it does. Like, oh, no, they're doing it.

Like, have a debate. Yeah, but this is a new product. This is a new product that further abstracts the core content, the source content. That's fair. That's fair. That's sourcing. I think that's the key thing here. We're witnessing, like, potentially one of the greatest, like, copyright scams in history with these models.

I mean, if they're allowed to maintain copyrights with those models, which they might not be able to. Again, if Neelai was here. Thank God. We already hung up on Neelai. Yeah. Thank God. He's calling back right now. Liam, don't let him in.

Don't let him in. All right. We should go. This is enough Vergecast. We've gone long as we are wont to do. Should we tell people how to find us on threads? Is that what we do now? We like stopped telling people our Twitter handles.

Should we tell them our threads? Yes, we should because I want you to say Nelais, because it's funny. The thing is, I don't want to say the phrase threads me because that sucks. So maybe this is why, maybe tweets is the answer. Tweet me on threads. See? I'm, I'm David Pierce because I'm going to kill whoever has David Pierce, and then I'll be David Pierce. But until then, there's an I'm at the beginning of it.

That other David Pierce dies in the next week. He's like a lawyer in Phoenix, and we are in a permanent war for David Pierce username. Is there an apostrophe there with the I'm or no? No, just all, just letters all the way down. Alex, you're Alex Heath, you know, whatever, Mr. Low Number joined. Alex Kranz, you're Alex H Kranz, right? Yeah, that's what I used on Twitter. It seems fine.

The H stands for Hustle. Yes, it does. Go to Kranz for all your hustle bro content. Decoder is a podcast. Neely's not here, so don't listen to it. Decoder's awful. I hate it forever. But where can you follow him?

You didn't say where we can follow Neelai. Oh, yeah, reckless. Reckless 1280 on threads. Because that's the year he was born, 1280. Next Wednesday on the Vergecast, we're going to talk about AI. We're also going to talk about video games with Ash Parrish and Chris Plant from Polygon. We talked about all our favorite games. It was very fun.

And we're also going to talk about a whole bunch of new Apple software, we think. It's all coming very soon. So we're going to talk about it. Until then, we'll see you on threads. That's it. That's Vergecast. Rock and roll. See you guys.

And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.