The genius of Threads onboarding

With Twitter continuing to circle the drain, the race to take it's place is picking up pace with the FOMO-inducing invite-only approach of Bluesky and open floodgates of Threads by Meta. I joined both this week so had the opportunity to reflect on the stark difference of the onboarding experiences. Which one will stick, only time will tell but right now, Threads has taken the lead and here's why.

Bluesky suffers the same as most start-up social media platforms. Once your account is created, there's no really simple way to build up your community. I've never personally felt right about syncing my contacts list so that was never an avenue for me, leaving me with manually finding people to follow. It's a fairly dull task so I don't put much time into it, leaving my following/follower lists to grow fairly organically.

By directly linking Threads with Instagram, Meta have overcome this hurdle by simply pulling your community from Instagram straight into Threads. I was given the option to follow everyone on my list which means my feed is already full of content from people I already know so I can get straight into using the app. Also, they allow users to "pre-follow" accounts on the platform - so if/when a user decides to log-in to Threads for the first time, they will already have a bunch of followers there waiting for them.

They've taken a lot of the pain out of starting a new social media account. It's too early to say whether it's going to succeed but so far, it's feeling a lot more active than other places, even after just 24 hours.