Users are the real losers

When Threads launched on July 5, it reported gaining more than 100 million organic users in the first five days, and it became clear the public was interested. The ease of transition, familiarity and the fact they didn’t need to learn new tech was enough to stop them from thinking: “Why even choose between the bad and the worse?”

As we happily hopped platforms, taking data from one multibillionaire and handing it to another, we missed the real issue. Twitter CEO Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg are the winners, but the users keep losing.

The costs Threads users are bearing to facilitate the transition amounts to billions of dollars. But they choose to do so with a clueless enthusiasm of abandoning the platform where users pay for verification and deal with limits on the number of posts they can read. “Stick it to the man” (by giving in to another one…). Who promised that Threads won’t impose the same practices, forcing users to either accept the social media big brother or move to yet another platform? Maybe it wouldn’t be all that bad.

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Teams behind blockchain-based social media and decentralized identities slept through an opportunity to work together and change how social networking approaches verification alongside profile and data ownership. With only recent promises to create a decentralized version of Reddit, we are too late on education and infrastructure to house the homeless Twitter outcasts. There is nothing left than to accept the easy, accessible Threads. But what exactly are we losing?

Profile portability and data management

Should you be able to be the same you, no matter what platform and provider you’re using?

Decentralized ID, or self-sovereign identity, is a form of identification or a digital profile. But in contrast to centralized accounts, the profiles, and related data, remain under users’ control. It’s like having a Google or Facebook account, using it to log into various applications and sites without being dependent on Google or Facebook as the sole providers and entities storing your data.

If Twitter and Threads used decentralized IDs, moving from one platform to another would be as easy as plugging your USB stick (remember those?) into a new laptop. But it isn’t like this. Why? Zuckerberg thrives on data sales. Twitter doesn’t monetize data to the same degree, but naturally, it does not want to give its data or users to a…