But have you considered paying $8 a month to use features that used to be free and also associate yourself with far right?

I don't know if it's just me, but I'm barely using reddit/twitter and now I spend most of my online time on Lemmy/Mastodon.

I thought the proverb was: cook a golden goose and you’ll eat for a day. Teach the golden goose to lay eggs and you’ll eat for a lifetime.

Gold is edible btw. Or at least inedible and non-toxic. It passes through without chemically reacting.

That's why I left. That's all I see on replies

It is the people that make a social network great.

You're right. I say this every time these conversations come up. It's the people that hold the power. Imagine how quickly things would change if everyone stopped using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Threads, WhatsApp, Telegram, Snapchat, etc. overnight. From billions/millions to users, to zero. Can you imagine how quickly the companies would change/adjust/pivot/react?

Social media company’s don’t understand what makes a Social network great.

Disagree. They know. It's just that they're trapped in an unethical business model that will never allow them to make it great. This is because the platform's interests are constantly at war with the user's interests. This was a critical mistake in the earlier days of the internet.

Google itself identified this in the early days in a paper that they wrote. They originally just wanted to organize the internet. But with an advertising revenue model, the interests of the advertisers was ultimately gonna be more important.

Call it "enshittification": Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

They don't care about making a great or even good product. It's solely about making as much money in as short a time period as possible, regardless of the long term consequences.

While it is true, there are also some factors which make people converge on some platforms. Factors beyond simply presence of other people. Like technical features.

Wonder how much of it is because of Threads and how much of it is from making the site inaccessible without accounts and the rate limit.

A random online estimator told me about 27m for a high school in the US. So like 1466 if you round that up to 30m for easier math.

In the meantime I remembered the existence of Nitter (and that it still works!), and there the screenshot is a JPEG, too, but in much better quality (https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FF0mvPmYaYAEUxU9.jpg). So it seems like, yes, the tech CEO publicly posts graph images as JPEG, but he does it in good quality, and it's the photo sharing community's microblogging service that kills the image uploads there by compressing them to death.

EDIT: In the next meantime, Threads itself seems to be dead, at least the embeeded tweet (or thread, or whatever they call it) in the Verge article has been replaced by a "View on Threads" button which leads me to an absolutely blank page.