A Threads Life

I downloaded Threads on a whim this year just to see what it was like. I’d already stopped posting much – if at all – on Twitter, and was mostly using Instagram for my social media fix.

My life on Twitter was full of the well-trodden tracks of my interests, my identities, and the people I’d befriended, and some I sort-of ‘knew’ in an internet way which isn’t quite good friends but isn’t acquaintance either.

Instagram was where I got to know people a little better, because it always felt a bit more intimate to me. And of course through blogging, community was made more compact. Twitter was for my writing and reading life, my deaf community life, and later on, a little more of the activist and neurodivergent aspects.

When Twitter started to implode, I missed that stream of people just writing and sharing their thoughts. For a while I tried Mastodon but it was a bit too siloed for my liking. And so I followed Twitter people on Instagram but started getting too overwhelmed (I now follow over 2,000 people!). So when Threads came along, I decided it was time for me to curate the algorithm anew, and attempt something different.

To me, Threads feels like an explosion of colour, because it’s allowed me to lean into my interests more in a way that wasn’t as possible on Twitter. I’m not as pressured to be something I’m not – in a way it feels like autistic unmasking. Sometimes on Twitter I felt constrained by the communities I was interacting with, and the ‘loudness’ of some of those voices.

When I got excited about watching The Acolyte, Rings of Power, and more recently Agatha All Along, I found fan posts and like-minded people much more easily on Threads and as a result leaned into following people who also enjoy those kind of interests. Some of my more esoteric interests like witchcraft (not that I would currently consider myself a witch or Wiccan, I just find aspects of it interesting!), Tarot, and even horror/spooky vibes seemed to find their way to me too.

Instagram, for me, is a better place to follow artists, people who share their lives in photos and in visual ways, comic artists, and news accounts. It’s slightly more difficult to use Instagram in a textual way unless you post infographics or share artwork with words. Not everyone has the patience to read captions these days, because Instagram has leaned more into video.

I’m not really a big fan of video posts (so many don’t add good captioning) and I’m too camera shy to try and post videos of myself (plus the added difficulty of adding captioning and lipreading myself!). Text based social media feels more natural to me. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy a good video post, it’s just that as much as I wish it was, it’s not my natural expression!

All to say, that it’s possible to make Threads work for you. It took a few months to train the algorithm to show me things I want to see (amongst them social justice and climate accounts), just usually by liking things, following the accounts that sounded interesting, and by being patient. Actively seeking out things that I was enjoying too. Commenting on people’s threads and reposting.

People do find social media overwhelming and frustrating, but I’m a big believer in making it work for you. It’s the things you interact with online and in social media apps that train the algorithms to show you what you’re seeing – and it is possible to make it a place of possibility with more joy and balance. I get a lot of cat posts and videos showing up (of course!) wherever I go! Life is always much better with cats.

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