Scottish GENES is now on Threads

Is this the end of days for Twitter as we have come to know it? 

In the last few months Elon Musk has made Twitter a fairly horrible place to be since buying it up and fairly well ruining the whole online networking experience. The genealogy community on Twitter has not in itself changed, but every day users now seemingly have to block new followers from right wing American organisations and other unsavoury areas for which no interest was ever shown, whilst basic services and tools such as TweetDeck are now being monetised, in the process ruining initiatives such as #AncestryHour. Twitter is fast becoming hard work in a way that it never previously was, and many users have been walking away.

On Thursday, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta launched a new social media app called Threads. The app works very similarly to Twitter, but with a character limit of 500, rather than Twitter's 240 characters, and also permits links and attachments. What it does not support yet is the use of hashtags (#), and it has no messaging facility either, but it can only be a matter of time before these become features.

Musk is seemingly concerned at the development, and is now threatening to sue Meta. Tied into Instagram, over 30 million people have apparently already signed up to Threads, and I am one of them - you can now find Scottish GENES at https://www.threads.net/@scottishgenesblog (@scottishgenesblog for short on the app). Threads is available for download for both Android and Apple devices.

I will stay on Twitter for a while longer (@genesblog), but if Threads becomes a success it is my intention to remove myself from Musk's platform as soon as possible.

I hope to maybe see you on Threads! 

(NB: I currently have two Twitter accounts - @chrismpaton and @genesblog. Please note that I will be deleting the first of these, @chrismpaton, in the next few days. I will continue with @genesblog for the foreseeable future, but it is my intention to withdraw from Twitter as soon as possible).

Chris

Order Tracing Your Belfast Ancestors in the UK at https://bit.ly/BelfastAncestors. Also available - Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records, Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. For the USA visit https://www.penandswordbooks.com. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Threads at @scottishgenesblog.