Logos for Meta's Threads and Twitter in an illustration. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters)
5 min

I am having the nightmare again.

They are making us sign up for another social media network.

This is the real one, everyone says. It has been months, yet they keep saying this. We are all sallow and gaunt from the effort of signing up for all these social media networks, stretched thin across platforms, our fingers aching from all the cross-posting and clicking through terms and conditions without reading them in their entirety. We are running so low on things to post that everyone is resurrecting dire concepts from their drafts folders, ideas that were better off not seeing the light of day. Even prolific posters are showing signs of strain.

Molly Roberts: The only app that can kill Twitter is Twitter itself

This one is Facebook but not. This imports your Instagram followers and username so you can be eternally punished for having picked an ill-advised username. It is called Threads, in honor of a made-for-TV movie about the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse whose Wikipedia summary alone has given me nightmares. Threads is a thrilling brand of torment for all the people who were good at Instagram because now they are supposed to be doing tweets, and these are two distinct skill sets. It is an equally thrilling brand of torment for all the people who were at home on Twitter because they are unfindable on Instagram, where they formerly exclusively posted photographs of themselves ruining various outfits with the same mustard-yellow sweater, not that I speak from personal experience. The homepage is just anthropomorphic brands trying to engage.

I don’t want to engage with these brands. I am tired.

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