MIKE Shout out to the private Slack and Discord groups I’m in that only contain a handful of close friends.

BRIAN And that all makes sense. People have learned that it’s not a great idea to share lots of personal information in the public sphere.

Also, if I want to talk to you, why would I @ you publicly rather than message you? That’s probably the biggest thing Threads lacks compared with Twitter — direct messaging — which makes Threads an inferior product at the moment. But it’s a matter of time until that’s added, since that feature is already part of Instagram.

MIKE I do think there’s a sort of performative element to talking in the public sphere, where my conversations with you take on a different tone and meaning — sort of like we’re talking onstage in front of an audience. There’s something fun about that. But it often can get very unfun very quickly. Messaging, as you note, helps circumvent that.

BRIAN For engaging with brands and influencers, text has also already lost the battle. The growing popularity of TikTok and Instagram’s Reels is evidence that casual tech users, especially young people, would rather see videos of the celebrities and influencers they follow and not read their bite-size text.

At the end of the day, comparing Twitter and Threads is tough since Threads is part of Instagram, which is much larger than Twitter. If the features improve, I could see myself switching to Threads from Twitter eventually because of Instagram’s sheer size, which could bring me more followers. (I’m @bxchen on Threads, by the way.) But like others, I probably won’t spend much time hanging out with friends there.

What about you?

MIKE Right now I’m doing the inconvenient juggling act of trying to post different things to six different networks, and it is not exactly fun. But I assume at least something will die off eventually and I can stop churning out the posts. At least, I hope so.

See you on … Threads, I guess?

BRIAN You need to follow me back first, Mike.