It's been like this for at least ten years. People keep claiming that Facebook has no users anymore and that Meta's numbers must be fake. Americans having no idea how important WhatsApp is elsewhere. Etc.
When user bases are measured in billions, you simply can't extrapolate your own anecdotal experience to anything. Some Meta product/feature can be very popular among a hundred disparate groups like "Filipino diaspora" and "Spanish-speaking children" and "North European singles" (and who knows how many more), but your social network has no intersection with these hundreds of millions of people, so you'd never know.
You can see many examples of this effect in these comments.
I still remember my own shock at learning how huge of a Brazilian user base Google+ had years after falling into obscurity in the english speaking world.
I think you can even see your old Orkut data in a Google Takeout (I saw it a few years back)
Now the network effects have set in and it's hard to remove "naturally" WhatsApp, combined with the rise of VoIP spam callers which operators are too happy to tolerate (like they tolerated things like premium ringtones and numbers until they were forced not to)
The fact that this still hasn't been solved in the year 2026 makes me wish nothing but bankruptcy on the entire legacy POTS system. Burn it all to the ground.
The US has more of an Apple-monoculture and apparently moved to unlimited SMS plans much earlier than Europe, so iMessage was able to fill the same niche
I had an iPhone and I was considering iMessage to be just fancy name for SMS, so I have avoided using it. Only years later I have found out that it was actually communication platform similar to WhatsApp, which can fallback on SMS.
It was free while SMS was not, and it ran on basically every cellphone that existed, no matter how shitty it was.
Network effects mean that replacing it is extremely hard. I tried getting people I know into Signal, Telegram, anything else. All those attempts were short lived.
I can't see it changing without some actual external intervention (e.g.: Meta being barred from operating it in Europe, etc).
The example was just mentioned as an extreme thing that would move this particular needle, not as something I think can oe will realistically happen.
"TIL Yahoo still exists"
or
"What? There's still a Yahoo?".
It's almost like there's a bot that adds these comments.
Apparently, there is no overlap between Yahoo users and people into cool tech. (I am still a Yahoo email user, so I guess I don't like cool tech).
Your comment remind me of the ~15 year old hype around Q&A sites. You have VCs say things like "everyone I know uses Quora" and that helped hype it up. But for anyone a little removed, Quora was just Yahoo Answers 2.0. And still is. This was a couple of years after Stackoverflow came out.
Remember the hype around location and Foursquare?
Anyway, it is important to remember that if you're actively on HN, you're not a normie and you probably have a very skewed view of what normies do and use.
Another example of what you're talking about (with essentialy isolated communities) was Orkut, which was hugely popular in Brazil and a couple of other places.
There are dozens of us still doing regular check-ins with Swarm, the check-in app that Foursquare rebranded years ago. Maybe hundreds even! It's a good time to join, mayorships are easier to get than ever and there are no busybodies left pushing pointless app updates!
And what if you're on HN and don't use what other are using there? I don't use AI. I don't use social media. I don't use JS frameworks. I don't use Go or Rust. I bang out HTML/JS/CSS by hand in an editor that is not VSCode when I write UIs. I also don't use Docker. Am I even allowed here?!
For a month or two at least, then even those groups got bored
I only ever hear this stuff from people that don't use Facebook. It's a self-selecting crowd and they have their fingers in their ears and theirs eyes closed shut while yelling into the void trying to convince themselves everyone else is just like them. Except all that's out there is the same echo chamber of people that also are doing the exact same thing.
Like the psychology bit that Freud seems absurd because all that's left to us are his mistakes because the rest has been so thoroughly absorbed you don't even realize it
For a long time my running group used it, and while it still does, the WhatsApp community is more used now. My (Catholic) church still uses Facebook for many announcements along with its own website.
I can remember when my Facebook feed was full of travel and baby pictures (not to mention much earlier days when it was how you got invited to parties) Now when I log in, the feed is full of slop, with maybe one actual update from someone I last saw in high school 20 years ago. That's not just because they're filling the feed with slop for the sake of it. If I navigate to a friend's profile their most recent updates are probably their last three birthdays, each with generic greetings offered by 3-5 people presumably not close enough to have their phone number. My last few friend requests are all bots. I'm sure people still habitually click the app and scroll for a few moments, and also sure it might be different for communities in India or Brazil but yeah... it really isn't what it used to be for regular people who heavily used it for at least a decade and couldn't care less about privacy concerns or Zuck's politics. It's gone from social network to third rate clickbait feed which happens to be a default app on more phones than the better ones...
As for Threads, there was something about the way they tried to entice signups with the world's dullest clickbait that just didn't induce me to see if anyone actually used it for stuff.
I hear a lot of people talk about Facebook Marketplace, but that's not a thing where I live, that probably pushes up the numbers a lot. When I do log in I sometimes check on some of the retro tech/homelabbing communities and they seem pretty popular with many posts a day, so there are definitely people there.
Apparently X currently has 561 million active users. It does not feel like that at all. I see the same accounts over and over, many of whom complain about lack of impressions and payouts.
Maybe they’re not being shadowbanned or ghosted. There’s just almost no real people using that site.
It's funny that you're making the same fundamental mistake that Elon made when he tried to get out of buying Twitter.
I followed a few accounts on Twitter and their interactions are all way down compared to a few years ago; this has been something of a trend on every network, though, so it might just be that the demographic that followed these accounts aged out of being high engagement users and there are other profiles that account for a greater proportion of overall engagement.
Honest question: how does 561 million active users should feel?
There are tons of real people using that site, who I suspect to be the ones they're trying to get rid of, and also by far the least affected by this chemotherapy. It's always been that way.
It's mostly photography and tech.
Compare that to Reddit where my "Home" page is actually FILLED with left extremist political propaganda and an endless onslaught of posts about Trump across frontpage subreddits.
I don't follow anyone and rarely use Twitter, so it doesn't have much signal on me, but a short scroll of my "For you" feed is pretty innocuous.
If I venture into any comment section, it's absolute drek. Going to the feed for a few of my local news channels and clicking through a few of their posts from today, I'm treated to half the comments being stuff along the lines of the following:
"Gee…an immigrant…no surprise"
"Another 3rd world import"
"Can’t predict the weather two days in advance but sure, global boiling for the summer. Got it."
"Queue in the carbon tax. FmL wake up people, it is a scare tactics. Like acid rain, hole in the ozone, polar ice caps flooding the coasts, you NEED CO2 for vegetation to live, and for the vegetation to gove YOU oxygen. Enjoy the few weeks of heat we get."
"She is a communist cow who supports terrorists"
To contrast X and Reddit, I’ve not seen content on Reddit that advocated for invading allies, passing illegal tariffs that as Americans, justifying accepting jumbo jets from other nations, shooting citizens in the streets, denaturalizing citizens of different ethnicities, or numerous other examples.
Bias side, also consider that discussions about Trump on Reddit are just current events and not something unexpected, since that’s just today’s news.
On the other hand, apart from extremist content, on X I also see extremist users. The replies on many topics and profiles are absolutely vile, and that’s what makes me think there must be a large number of bots. It’s an echo chamber because normal people can’t tolerate that type of toxicity, but it’s an echo chamber with massive reach apparently.
This sort of content is illegal in some EU jurisdictions and after I reported it, it took Reddit days to take it down, with no action on the subreddit's moderation who participated in it.
I think left extremism is a fair description here; it's at least far left.
On social media, when I click "Pics", I'd expect photography.
What we see there is political content that distinctly reminds of a publication from a local socialist youth chapter.
It doesn't surprise me at all, after reading "Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter" by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. Interesting behind the scenes of what happened to Twitter.
Fascinating my anecdotal experience is the opposite. I’ve also been using Twitter for the last 17 years and I’ve finally got the opportunity to purchase the dead username I want.
Good luck with that. You didn't really buy it, you're temporarily renting it from Musk. If you stop paying, you'll also lose your username.
It's like saying you don't see any Instagram posts on HN, so Instagram must be tiny. Its more likely the subcommunities that post on Threads don't have overlap with HN.
I've tried threads. Moderately engaging. Took nothing from it. Twitter has a HN like quality where there's a lot that's unimportant and occasionally you see something you'd see nowhere else.
One of the more pleasing things about threads is that the "for you" page doesn't appear to push stuff that is rage bait _for you_, (what ever your bias is)
There seems to be a weighting in favour of stuff that isn't angry. There is stuff, but it seems to ask for actual confirmation that you want to continue to see it.
Its not all roses though, they are busy fucking up notifications like they did on facebook.
This is a weird metric to determine informational accuracy, as you're talking about a specific use case (reposting content on a 3rd-party platform), you're not accounting for user selection (is the average HN dude more likely to use X or Threads as their primary mico-blogging?) and it doesn't account for the fact that the entire FB/Threads/Instagram ecosystem feeds into itself (I'm never stumbling across X content that I want to engage with because that's now how I use the internet, but I'm constantly clicking something on IG that prompts me to give in and sign up for Threads)
Anything X says at any point about itself is likely to make me very skeptical because I think it's a dogshit site run by a bald, nepotic loser capitalist, that says nothing about the quality of the reporting or how accurate it is though.
This. I use Instagram and every time I scroll through the feed there's a stripe of Threads content, clearly algorithmically chosen to grab attention. The thing is, only the top part of every post is visible, and one needs to download / go to Threads to read the rest and the replies (many posts I've seen are specifically the kind where you're more interested in replies than the post itself).
Bluesky occasionally gets a boost of posts but then dies off. This last week's transition has been more vibrant. Simonw, danabramov, natolambert post regularly. (If you're into to the tech things I think it's finally growing. Bluesky is still pretty nasty but blocklists + sentiment changes making it less toxic.)
I think I'd like private likes and other features atproto doesn't currently allow that I think would improve algorithm signal. Currently too easy to pollute bluesky's discover with likes from too many topics.
It doesn't have all the bad x features introduced since 2022 which is nice. Bluesky recreates the active conversation feel twitter has. Does threads, or does it feel like 'comments'?
Meh, I've seen it before and after. It used to have a lynch mob mentality, but now it doesn't show me the accounts I follow but other people's.
I don't understand this complaint. The "Following" tab is prominent at the top and gives you exactly what you are asking for. It even remembers which tab was selected.
Still does?
I miss the discussions on things like game dev, digital art, programming, math, etc that I used to get from forums that have since all moved to discord and has become a hollowed existence.
Maybe this is just me getting old. Mastodon sounded like it could have been the next thing but the whole distributed nature makes it cumbersome. I’ll look into it again.
I found that 2025 was the year for me to stop, decompress, research SOTA models and AI stuff, and disconnect from anything not providing in my life.
Another unfortunate trend is that laypeople using real names on "social media." It's fine if you are a politician or artist using this as an "official" comms account, but for ordinary people it's just asking for trouble.
There's no going back to what it was in the late 90s/early 2000s, the audience is different, the way the content is consumed is different, the content itself is very different. Blog networks where you follow through links are not going to be the future.
> Not so long ago, if you had to share something with the world, you hosted your own webpage.
This is long ago in Internet terms, it's been 15+ years it's not the case, it's unfortunately long in the past.
Not diminishing the growth, but "daily active users" hitting parity with X is a different achievement when you have that kind of distribution baked in Meta
> 2. The gatekeeper shall not do any of the following: [...]
> (c) cross-use personal data from the relevant core platform service in other services provided separately by the gatekeeper, including other core platform services, and vice versa; and
> (d) sign in end users to other services of the gatekeeper in order to combine personal data,
so Meta may have decided it's not worth fighting it and removed the requirement for Instagram accounts for people connecting from the EU.
> "For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally?
So clearly he knew he was making the site undeserving of public trust and reaping the rewards of that.
Also, the site is leaning into creating content that's overtly immoral and downright felonious in many jurisdictions, and this is likely going to catch up with it this year. I would bet this current bad news for them is just the beginning.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1294062/social-media-yea...
> A year ago, X had twice as many daily active users in the U.S. as it does now
also this just doesn't seem to be true, at least according to the graph. it looks like 150m to 125m?
The graph shows a decline in Daily Active Users worldwide, not just in the US.
The exposure to "what's what" in the tech space is clearly better on Twitter and it isn't even close. Nearly all tech news breaks on Twitter first, then flows downstream to Threads. For everything else it's kind of hard to say because I aggressively curate my social media feeds, so I don't get much content outside of my bubble.
The tech information I tend to get on Threads is more personal updates on mutuals' projects and niche eureka moments they have. There's maybe a dozen of these that I regularly see and interact with and maybe a couple dozen more that pop up occasionally. But again, this is after aggressively curating my feed and maintaining it for ~3 years.
I have a feeling that my efforts could have yielded better results on Twitter had I spent all that time posting and interacting there instead of Threads (or in addition to), hence me increasing my posting there.
Also due to large amount of spam, many instances don't federate with Threads.
Once they all had apis.
Could you perhaps spell out what irony you are referring to?
Social media is once again stubbornly regional both in place and age
Why search for the best version of a bad thing?
Especially when entropy inevitably takes your investment in building a digital persona there and devalues it?
I don’t have professional or personal connections here (though I know a few members irl) and this is not part of my permanent digital identity— I don’t have one of those, for a few reasons. Others do it differently, and I think the risk of HN going bad is low, so I understand the risk they are taking.
This is a mall - a publically open space privately owned by others - not a true public square. It’s better than x, fb, etc. in part because the private ownership is mostly used for good (strong moderation) rather than for obvious bad.
If English is not your native tongue, I'd suggest you to find an instance in your language, so you can easily see all kinds of content if you filter by "Local".
Some random active communities to follow:
- https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted
Bluesky is the only decent place (till it isn't).