‘Threads is doomed’ articles are doing the rounds, based on sometimes questionable stats around how many users the site’s lost since its dramatic debut. Mastodon has gone through the same story at least twice. Although, bizarrely, some folks on that platform crow about Threads’ misfortunes, missing that the basic ‘Twitter and closed will still win’ narrative affects that service too.

The more interesting numbers in Time’s Tech Brief come from people who abruptly stopped posting. Again, the same happened on Mastodon. There was a huge influx of people, many posting there because they claimed staying on Twitter didn’t align with their integrity. And then they inevitably mostly scurried back to Twitter. Why?

Much of this feels like entitlement. They expected everyone to follow them, instantly, to somewhere new. And when they broadcast and realised the audience wasn’t there, they didn’t want to build again and so returned to the House of Musk  – even though the audience there is diminishing.

I get it. Starting again is hard. It can feel too much. Doubly so if your career/income in some way relies on a larger audience you’ve spent years painstakingly building without the brand/visibility advantage afforded to a major celebrity. And if you’re used to engagement, it can be quite humbling to suddenly be surrounded by silence. I found this myself when I first joined Mastodon in 2018. Since then, things have changed, in part because I invested time in the service, but also because I wrote a piece on Mastodon that was widely shared. I don’t see the same thing happening on Threads, where, I dunno, B-list tech journo doesn’t exactly give you any creds with the algorithm. But whatever. I still have the occasional nice exchange with folks there. That’s enough.

What I miss more is the diverse and fun group of people I read and chatted with on Twitter. Mastodon covers part of that and is good in its own right, but it’s not the same. I miss comics artists and comedians, news anchors and specific creators of oddball little projects. Then again, nothing is going to be the same as Twitter – perhaps ever again.

Twitter was a strange one-off where lots of different people came together from a huge range of fields, and that was combined with breaking news and brands wanting to help you (via DM) rather than just sell to you (as on Threads). Now, Twitter is increasingly a hideous bloodbath of extremism, Mastodon is a haven for geeks, creatives are over at Bluesky, various folks are trying to make the best of Threads, and so on.

I don’t think any of these services is doomed. Some might not last. What is doomed is the notion that Twitter can be replaced, because it can’t – not even by the current Musk incarnation of Twitter.

Summer happened. It was on Thursday. Spring before. Autumn now.

Published stuff

Over at Stuff, I wrote What is X, why does Elon Musk want an everything app, and why did Twitter have to die? Technically, it’s an X explainer. (An X-plainer?) But, erm, I may have added snark.

This week’s column is: Packing tech for your summer holiday? Hell-o-day, more like. Which has me reminisce about watching the top third of an in-flight movie while surrounded by smoke, and then moving to modern-day trips, where there’s less smoke, more screens, and – surprisingly – just as much ‘Tetris’ packing.

For TapSmart, I wrote about why Apple should take OS parity seriously and macOS Sonoma features I want on iPhone and iPad.

Other stuff

Despite having had two days off this week, I’m knackered. Primarily because the days off involved packing in summer holiday things for the youngling, in the final days before our Merlin pass runs out. On Thursday, we were at a weirdly empty Chessington. Today: London. All good. But I’m now apparently Gets Tired Too Easily years old, and also Knee Randomly Goes Sproing On London Bridges years old. Tsk.

One major plus this week was that our Chessington trip aligned precisely with the south of England’s ‘summer’. It lasted one day and was glorious. Given that we’d planned the trip weeks in advance, I felt grateful. But I do imagine I’m going to head into autumn feeling robbed about this year’s non-summer. I’ll take it over the horrors of fires and such in the south of Europe, but as someone who has trouble with lack of light, I’m already feeling the evenings drawing in. And there have been so few bright ones this year.

Not-summer in the UK continues. Hoping at some point the rain and cold might stop. In the meantime, send canoes. And fleeces.

Published stuff

Given that it’s the summer holidays and I have a nine-year-old, I’ve been battling Screen Time. So I wrote about it for Stuff: Screen Time = scream time. Parents need more human device tracking.

The latest issue of the print magazine is out, which features my round-up of last-minute holiday apps, a primer on animation with a phone, features on creative kit for illustrators and musicians (which includes my review of the oddball CMPSR joystick thing for making noise), and a fond/snarky look back at the very first Chromecast.

Over at TapSmart, I – with some irony – dig into barbecue apps, and I pit Apple Maps against Google Maps. Issue 281 of our sister mag, Swipe for iPhone, is also out, if you’d like to support our little indie venture.

Upcoming stuff

Next week, I’ll be fully immersed in the murky waters of beta operating systems, as I start work on my annual overviews for what’s coming to iPhone, iPad and Mac. Expect grumbles as I discover Stage Manager still doesn’t do quite what I’d like it to.

Other stuff

A stark reminder, today, about the nature of social media. I read through my Mastodon feed, which was pleasant, chatted to friends on Messenger, and caught up with Threads. Then I opened X/Twitter, and the first DM was from someone who told me to “get f——ed” for some article I’d written. I’ve no idea which one. I suspect it was probably this one.

I do miss what Twitter was, but I don’t care for what it’s become. Musk is making it easier and easier to cut ties with the service, even though many friends still post, and quite a lot of work came my way through it. I don’t have anywhere near the same level of outreach elsewhere (my Threads follower count is tiny). But X feels so angry all the time, and I don’t want to have to deal with that anymore.

Ack. Nearly forgot this week. Anyway: onwards!

Published stuff

Over at Stuff, I wrote X marks the rot. Don’t buy into Elon Musk’s lifelong crusade. My point: an everything app is the last thing we need from a company that can’t be trusted. My implementation: initially dipping into a terrifying future where your life depends on giving Elon Musk a daily X. Yikes.

For TapSmart, I added Device 6 to my classic apps list. Nothing else has for me ever matched this app’s combination of writing, design, style, smarts and full-on touchscreen integration (including some very meta elements). I also wrote about some of the new meaningful sharing features coming to iOS 17.

Upcoming stuff

I spent much of last week buried in a big feature for Stuff that digs into top hardware and services from the magazine’s lifetime. It’s always interesting to revisit tech from a decade or two ago that was revolutionary at the time, but that would be meaningless today.

I particularly fondly remember our Toppy (Topfield PVR). This let us pause TV (handy, since our then puppy always wanted to go for a wee when a show started) and record two channels while watching a third. But even better: it was customisable. You could replace the entire UI and do pretty much whatever you wanted with the device. I miss that kind of flexibility; but I don’t miss TV that requires any kind of planning. On-demand suits me. It is the way.

Other stuff

July in the UK is taking it out of me. I’ve elsewhere described our weather this year as follows:

• January: January
• February: February
• March: March
• April: March
• May: March
• June: July, but imported from Spain
• July: April

It looks like August is going to be just as grim as July. Cool. Grey. Dull. Obviously, that’s better than the nightmare happening in Southern Europe, but combined with all the horrifying graphs about climate change I’ve seen online, it’s getting me down. I don’t feel like myself right now, and I’m struggling to figure out how to right that.

I did at least get to the second day of Digitiser’s 30th anniversary, in an attempt to cheer myself up a bit. Digitiser was a daily games magazine on Teletext in the UK. To say it had irreverent humour is putting it mildly. The games industry hated it. The traditional publishing industry hated it even more. Readers loved it. The mag was relentlessly fun and creative.

The 30th was a live event, drawing more from what Digitiser has morphed into as a YouTube channel than its games history, although a follow-up to the original Digitiser The Show is now in the works.

Anyway, it was all very silly, with everyone having an awful lot of fun on stage. A little ray of sunshine in a country that has too little of that right now.

Squally April showers here today. Which is mildly annoying, given that it’s July. Oh well.

Published stuff

My column for Stuff this week is: VanMoof’s demise shows how reliant we are on here-today, gone-tomorrow apps. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot of late, given how many devices and toys can now only be used with an app. And as I wrote last week, it’s not like most apps stick around.

Having recently updated my Mastodon guide and listed 8 alternatives when you want to give Twitter the bird, I turned my hands to Zuckerberg’s latest baby with Get started with Instagram Threads. All you need to know to switch from Twitter.

I’m still finding Threads a bit weird. But I think when it gets a reverse chronological feed, I’ll spend more time there and even less on Twitter. Mastodon remains my social network of choice, however.

I also updated my best upcoming Lego sets feature for Stuff, while making pining noises at all the great stuff coming out.

That’s it for new writing from me this week, but if you’re in the mood for supporting indie journalism, the latest issue of Swipe is out, featuring my overviews of chatbot apps for iPhone, a piece on Procreate, a look at how Apple tackles mental health, and a quick dip into why I want Apple mobile devices to support multiple users.

Upcoming stuff/other stuff

I’m writing a monster of a feature for Stuff, digging into dozens of pieces of tech kit released during the lifespan of the magazine – which goes all the way back to 1996.

The main thing this confirmed to me, having done a lot of research: every single timespan you care to explore over the past 30 or so years has amazing things that happened in tech. For those people heavily immersed in the industry, it might seem like we’re seeing nothing more than endless iteration. That’s not the case.

Stunning shifts happen on a very regular basis. If you don’t feel that yourself, take a step back, get off the treadmill for a while, and see what happens when you return with fresh eyes.