Special Episode: Meta’s Twitter Rival Arrives, with Adam Mosseri

You know, pretty soon, I’ll be posting threats, which is what I’m calling Thread posts. And we’ll see if people like those, too.

Somehow, I don’t think that that thing is going to catch on. Threats is not what I would have called it. Let’s think of some other words. What should it be called?

Well, I’m loading up thesaurus.com. Hold on. So we have attires, costumes, duds.

Duds, I like duds.

Hey, did you see my new dud?

Yeah, it was — your dud was a flop, unfortunately.

I can’t believe you didn’t redud it.

Cool duds, man.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I’m Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at “The New York Times.”

I’m Casey Newton from platformer. And you’re listening to a special edition of “Hard Fork.” That’s right, Kevin, because this week Instagram head Adam Mosseri stops by to talk to us about the launch of the company’s new Twitter competitor, Threads.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So Casey, as we said on the show last week, we are officially on vacation this week. This is not an episode that we saw coming or expected to make. And I was actually literally on the beach with my family when I got the ping on my Apple Watch from you telling me that we had a very special opportunity this week to interview Adam Mosseri, who is the head of Instagram, about this new app called Threads. So tell me, what is it about this story and this new app that made you think, you know what? Kevin doesn’t need to be on vacation this week.

Well, first of all, I never think you should be on vacation. I always think he should be with me, helping to enjoy that week’s news. And look, in America, we do believe in vacation. But we also believe that taking vacation is a moral failure. So I think it’s only appropriate that, on this 4th of July week, we celebrate our nation’s heritage by coming in on our days off to have, what turns out to be, I think, a really interesting conversation.

But you know, Kevin, one of the big stories that we’ve been tracking, since we started this show, was the sea change in social networks, right? A world that felt very stable, ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, has felt very unsettled. And the one shoe left to drop was would Meta, the biggest player in the space — would they try to seize this opportunity and see if they could finally get rid of this competitor that has just annoyed them for over a decade?

And to be candid with you, I messaged Adam Mosseri in December and said, would you please just build a working Twitter clone? I was kind of in a desperate state. I didn’t care who built it. I just wanted something that I knew would work and that would be managed in a really straightforward way.

And so when I found out it was actually going to happen and that we had an opportunity to talk to Adam Mosseri, who’s been on Instagram for a long time and who is overseeing this project for Meta, I thought, we’ve just got to hop on the mics and hear all about it.

Yeah, it’s not every day that a new social network comes out, especially not one by Meta, which is the king of social networks. And this is something that has been rumored for months, that Instagram was working on an app like Twitter to take advantage of perceived weakness at Twitter.

But this is really the first time that we’ve been able to ask them directly how it will be similar to Twitter and how it will be different. And it seems like one of the big differences is decentralization. So unlike Twitter and also unlike Facebook and Instagram, Threads is going to be decentralized. So Casey, what does that mean?

Well, it means that, eventually, it is going to work with other social networks. So Mastodon is the big one. Both Mastodon and Threads are built on something called ActivityPub. And that is a protocol that anyone can build on. And so in the future, it will be possible for you to look at Mastodon posts on Threads and look at Thread posts on Mastodon. That will also be true of whatever else might get built on ActivityPub.

So why does that matter? Well, it just means that Meta, for the first time in its history, is giving up a lot of control. It’s saying, we’re going to open up our doors. We’re eventually going to even let you take your entire following off of Threads to some other social network, if you would like to. So as reporters have been covering this company for a long time, it’s hard to overstate what a sea change that is philosophically for them.

Yeah. And I think it could actually work. I mean, one thing that has always kept me from wanting to join a new Twitter clone like Bluesky or Mastodon, even though I am on both of those, is that you have to start from zero, right? No matter who you are, no matter how many followers you have spent years and years amassing, you join a new platform, that counter goes right back to zero.

With Instagram Threads, that is not a problem because you can take your followers, as I understand it, over from Instagram to Threads. It’s going to be very easy for people to just connect their accounts and follow all the same people on Threads that they do on Instagram. And so I think if you are a celebrity, or an elite journalist, or someone else who has a lot of followers on Instagram, you are going to be very excited about not having to start totally from scratch.

Well, now, Kevin, here’s where I actually do have a confession for you because do you know what happened to me about an hour ago?

What happened?

I got access to the Threads app.

Lucky you. How is it?

Well, I’ve been having a pretty good time out there, hanging out with all my Thread Heads. That’s what I’m calling them. It’s pretty wild to just be able to view however many posts you want to look at on a social network without being rate-limited. Some people said that infinite posts were a zero interest rates phenomenon. But on Threads, it’s like we’re back in 2020, baby.

But how is catturd2 doing on Threads? Has he made an appearance yet? Has he reached 100,000 followers?

I have not seen catturd2 over on the Threads app. In fact, so far, particularly when I got on, it really was just a handpicked crew of mostly just celebrities and very famous Instagram users and also some brands. So Netflix was on there telling jokes. And the “Hollywood Reporter” was posting some stories. Mark Cuban was talking about what a nice community it seemed like Threads have. Of course, it’s easy to have a nice community when there’s only maybe 2,500 people on the entire app. But look, when you open this thing, you’re going to say like, yeah, that looks kind of a beta version of Twitter with maybe some slightly nicer user interfaces. But Kevin, here’s the key difference.

What if it turns out that this is the only difference you need to take an app no one has heard of before today and turn it into a success? Maybe the only thing you need is for it to not be run by Elon Musk. And that is actually the test that we’re about to go through.

They should just make that the tagline in the App Store. “Like if Twitter was not run by Elon Musk.”

Yes.

So it’s been reported that among the people that Instagram has been trying to get over onto Threads are Oprah and the Dalai Lama. And I would just like to say that I think our posts would be better than either Oprah’s or the Dalai Lama’s. And so I’m a little offended that they didn’t try to get us in there first.

Well, now, Kevin, we’re trying to get both Oprah and the Dalai Lama to come on “Hard Fork.” So don’t say anything too critical of them, OK? Because we still want them to return the email. But look, they’ve successfully recruited me over there. That was a huge win for them. And then maybe they’ll be able to get you too. And then we’ll be in good shape.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When we come back, our conversation with Instagram’s Adam Mosseri.

Adam Mosseri, welcome to “Hard Fork.”

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

So Adam, several months ago, when things started to go awry on Twitter, I sent you a message. And I said, please, please, please, would you consider just building a place where I could type my little sentences and have a good time? And fast forward to today and it seems like you’ve actually done that. So I guess the first thing I need to say is thank you for that.

Yeah, you get credit. You get 100 percent of the credit, Casey.

Now, obviously, lots of people were asking you to do this. But I think at the time you said, look, I’m torn. There are reasons to do this. There are reasons not to do this. So what were you weighing at the time? And what kicked you over into, OK yeah, let’s make Threads.

I will answer that question. But I actually do want to give you a little bit of credit because lots of people have pushed. But you pushed earlier and more consistently than anybody. So you do get more credit than you’re giving yourself.

Newton gets results.

Yes.

He does, he does. Look, I think that whenever you’re launching a new app, it’s a big risk, right? Every new app is much less likely to succeed than to succeed. And we know that. And so we want to go into eyes wide open whenever we’re doing anything like this.

But just given how much demand there seem to be for alternatives and given how vibrant and really amazing the creator community specifically is on Instagram, we thought there might be an opportunity to do something in the space of public conversations, of public discourse, more focus on the communities that use and love Instagram.

And we debated just building text into Instagram feed. We debated having a separate tab inside the Instagram app, and then obviously the option of having a separate app entirely. And we settled on the most risky of the three. But you’ve got to take some swings. And I’m excited about it. We’ll see how it goes.

Now, what does it look like actually? When you open the app, how similar is it to the existing interface of Twitter, or Bluesky, or Mastodon, or any of these other text-based social networks? What will users actually see when they open up Threads for the first time?

It’s similar. One of the funny things is in these few days of testing with a limited number of people, people have been really hesitant to say the name Twitter in the app. And I keep replying to people like, you can say Twitter. It’s OK. All the credit to where it’s due. I mean, they pioneered the format. But there are a lot of people playing in the space now, which made us think that there is a demand for alternatives. It’s similar. The main tab is a feed. The next tab is Search. The third tab is like Instagram. It’s the Composer. It’s where you actually write or start a Thread, then your activity, and then your profile.

One thing that we know is, when you start a new text-based social network, you have to come up with some silly sounding word for a post. Like on Mastodon, I think it’s a Toot. And on Bluesky, it’s a Skeet. So what is a Thread’s post called?

Just a thread, just a thread.

I think it’s keeping with the Toot, the Tweet, the Skeet, Thread post should be called Threats. So that’s my vote.

Stitches has been the most popular one that has bubbled up. There’s a lot of puns right now in the app. The punnage is way over the top. But Stitch is the most popular one I’ve seen so far.

So when you log into Threads, you use your Instagram handle. And you can import anyone you’re following on Instagram that is on Threads. You can automatically follow them. But what would you say is the relationship between these two things, both today and maybe how you see it in a year or two from now?

My hope is that they’re complementary. I think that there are going to be communities of people on Instagram for whom Instagram is absolutely sufficient, right? You don’t need any more features. We’ve got a lot of features in Instagram right now.

But there are going to be then other communities who really want to engage in public discourse, right? You’re going to debate what’s going on in the playoffs. You want to talk about Pharrell’s debut show as the men’s director of Louis Vuitton, whatever it is. And if you want to be engaging in those types of public conversations or be part of the audience for those, Threads is going to be fundamentally a better place.

The post and comment model, which is how YouTube works, and Facebook works, and Instagram works is great. But it really does not support public discourse nearly as well as the tweet and reply model. Elevating the reply to essentially the same level as the initial post allows for much more robust, diverse discourse, which is part of the reasons why we didn’t try to just shove this thing into either Feed on Instagram or a separate tab.

So I think one of the most surprising things about Threads is that it is decentralized. This stuff gets pretty confusing. But it’s also maybe the most unusual thing about this. So Adam, what does it mean that Threads is decentralized?

The technical meaning is that it’s built on the ActivityPub protocol, which is a technology that’s behind all of the Mastodon servers and apps. What that means is there are a bunch of different apps, or social networks, that can all integrate. And so you’ll be able to actually follow people who don’t even use Threads, but use these other apps, from Threads. And you’ll be able to actually follow people and their content from threads without even using that app and using other apps like Mastodon.

And I do think that decentralization — but more specifically or more broadly, more open systems are where the industry is getting pulled and is going to grow over time. And for us, a new app offers us an opportunity to meaningfully participate in that space in the way it would be very difficult for us to support an incredibly large app like Instagram over. And so to lean into where the industry is going, to learn, it’s been very humbling speaking to a bunch of people in the community who look at us, unsurprisingly, with a lot of skepticism. But I do think it’s going to be fundamentally good. And I do think it’s going to translate into not philosophical, but meaningful things for creators over the long run. Like, you should be able to take your audience, if you build up an audience on Threads — and if you decide to leave Threads, take your audience with you. And theoretically, over time, we should be able to support use cases like that that really empower creators and, I think, lean into what creators are going to demand and expect over time.

Sure. Well, so you’re telling me what I want to hear as arguably a creator. Yeah, I would love to have my audience be portable. I think I’m still struggling to understand why it’s good for you, right? Instagram is a centralized social network. And it makes a lot of money.

You have a lot of control. You can just build it exactly to your liking. Now, you’re opening up the doors and saying, we’re tying ourselves to a protocol that might not always evolve in the direction that we want it to. So where did this idea come from to decentralize? And how are you thinking about those trade-offs?

There definitely are trade-offs. You’re giving up some control. But there are benefits. I do think, over time, it’s going to be a more compelling value proposition that other apps aren’t going to offer. And I think that should attract more creative talent over the long run. Obviously, I don’t think a large percentage of creators are interested in this, specifically decentralized technology, today. But more and more are. And they’re definitely interested in things like owning their audience.

We also get some benefits. If there are other apps that are really large that use the same protocol, you’ll be able to follow content from those servers in our app. And so it is a give and take. But yeah, you are giving up some control. It’s not absolute control. So for instance, you can build other things into the app that the ActivityPub protocol does not support. And they’ll just be limited to the app. So you don’t have to limit the things you build to things that the protocol has already designed for. But obviously, you won’t benefit from any of the decentralized opportunities if you do that.

Do you think the decentralization piece of this is actually critical to making it work or not? And I ask that because I’ve spent a lot of time on Bluesky, which is the social alternative to Twitter right now, the leader in that space. And one thing that a lot of people on blue sky talk about is the fact that they don’t really care about any of this decentralization stuff. They just want a place to go that works like Twitter, but is not owned by Elon Musk.

So do you think that the decentralization piece of this actually will result in a better user experience? Or is it just kind of like a bone to maybe throw the company’s critics people who say, I don’t want to use another app owned by Meta, I’m wary of what they’re going to do with my data, or I’m worried about some of the privacy considerations there? Is the decentralization piece actually going to move the needle for adoption on Threads?

I don’t think it’s going to move the adoption in the short term. But I do think it’s going to move the adoption in the long term. I sure hope so because it’s a ton of work. And if it doesn’t, then it certainly was time poorly spent. Supporting a decentralized protocol with all the different things that we do — reporting flows, classifying things, ranking content — is actually a ton of work.

It’s one of the reasons why it’s taken much longer than I wanted to get this thing out the door. And we’re still not actually supporting ActivityPub protocol at launch. Hopefully, we’re fast-following with that. So yeah, I believe it will move the needle over the long run. But I think, in the immediate future, this week, there’s going to be a bunch of attention because it’s Instagram, and it’s a competitive space.

The headlines are easy to write. And we’re going to a bunch of users. And then a bunch of them are going to leave because that’s how it always goes. And then we have to slowly build ourself back up. And to me, this is in the column of things that are, I think, going to be meaningful over the next two years, or three years, or four years. I don’t think it’s going to meaningfully change what usage of the app looks like over the next two or three months.

I want to understand how you’re going to make money from Threads over the long term. Is it as simple as you just put ads in the feed?

That’s the most likely direction. But honestly, we’re not focused on it at all right now. That would be such a champagne problem to have, that we had so many users and they were using the app so much that the revenue opportunity was something that we would have to focus on.

Right now, I just want to make something that people love and they use. It’s not nearly as hard to get a bunch of people to try something as it is to build something that of people want to keep using over time. So that’s really the focus of the team. I don’t want to mislead anyone. We believe in ads. We think they are a way to offer free service worldwide. We think it’s a good thing. But right now, it’s just not the focus at all for the app. I think that would be the definition of a champagne problem.

Yeah. Well, speaking of getting a lot of people to use the app, it looks like Threads isn’t going to launch in the EU right away. What’s going on with that?

There are complexities with complying to laws coming out in 2024. And we want to make sure not only that are we compliant with the laws that are coming out, but that we can also credibly explain how we are compliant in ways that meet our standards of documentation and testing. And that’s just going to take a while, unfortunately.

And I’m particularly frustrated on this point because I’ve been living outside of the US for a year now. I’ve been on a total kick with my teams about stop launching things only in a couple of countries and not in other countries. I meet creators who ask me things like, do I need to move to the US to get access to such and such feature? And it breaks my heart. But in this case, it was either wait on the EU or delay the launch by many, many, many months. And I was worried that our window would close because timing is important.

And the specific rub there, as I understand it, is that the EU’s regulations require some sort of fine-grained disclosures about data sharing between apps and how much Threads data can be shared back with Instagram and with Meta. Is that roughly right? Or what is the specific hold-up there?

It’s not just disclosures and consent. It’s also verifying that there’s no data leakage. You have to put in place processes and technology that all but guarantee that anything you say you can verify in usually multiple ways. And so you have to design that system. You have to build that system. You have to build the testing of that system. And then you have to figure out how to communicate that system.

And we’re just under an immense amount of scrutiny. And any time we make a mistake, even if it was innocuous, even if there’s no one harmed — but if we said something and we didn’t deliver on it, we get hit hard either by the media or by regulators with fines. And so it’s just the liability is too great.

Adam, I want to take a step back and just talk about the overall arch of Meta’s efforts in social media over the past few years. It seems like, at a corporate level, you all have been trying to get away from hard news and political controversy.

This is the type of content that has been demoted in, for example, the Facebook newsfeed. It’s much harder to find divisive political content there. Instagram was never really the first place that people went to have their political arguments and rants. But it has some of that content there, too.

But it really seems like the company has been trying to shift away from hard news and politics and into lighter entertainment fare. This seems like a step in the other direction. Twitter is famously a battleground for fractious political debate and controversy. Why would you want to bring more of that onto your platform and your company’s products?

I don’t. I don’t. I want to be really clear. And I want to recognize the irony of saying this to reporters while being recorded. But no, I don’t want to lean into hard news at all. I don’t think that there’s much that we can or should do to discourage it on Instagram or on Threads. But I don’t think we’ll do anything to encourage it. Obviously, there’s news on Instagram. There’s news on Facebook. I think there’s more news on Facebook and more news on Twitter than there is on Instagram, as a percentage, is my guess. But we are less designed for that. Threads, by being, I think, more supportive of public discourse, I think, is going to be appealing to some people in that world, and in that industry, and in that vertical. And that’s inevitable.

But no, that’s not at all the hope. The hope is to focus on the verticals that are already strong on Instagram, things like sports, and music, and fashion, and beauty, and design, and art. Actually, one of the interesting things I found — there’s a bunch of photographers in the app right now. And they’re really excited. And I was trying to be really nice about this. But I was like, why?

I’m excited you’re here, too. But really, seriously, why? And almost all of them said the same thing, which is like, look, we’re not here to share photography. We’re here to talk to other photographers about photography. We also want to have conversations about what we do. So my hope is that’s where our strength is. But I recognize that we cannot control who uses the app. And we will end up with hard news and political reporters, too.

Yeah. And I mean, I think if it succeeds, it’s going to be in part because news junkies love it, right? This is the reason why myself and other people wanted you to build this was the news junkies are just desperate for a place to write their little sentences.

And you can’t see this on the podcast, but Adam is furiously waving his hands in a stop motion.

Yeah, Adam is having an aneurysm right now.

There’s room for multiple text-based social networks in the industry. Twitter is an amazing product with a long history of supporting that use case phenomenally well.

The title for this episode is going to be “Twitter is an amazing product.” So, actually, though, speaking of the news and links, Adam, let’s talk about the content moderation. And this gets back to the decentralization piece, right? Because one of the fears of a decentralized social network is it just becomes harder to police what’s on it, right?

If eventually Threads is interoperable with Mastodon or something else that’s built on ActivityPub, maybe people are putting stuff there that you would never permit under the Instagram community guidelines. So I guess my two questions there — one is just, how is content moderated on Threads in general? Does it fall under Instagram’s guidelines? And then how is that going to evolve once you start plugging this thing into other apps?

So the community guidelines are the same for Threads as they are for Instagram. There’s an immense amount of benefit there because we can bring the systems that we’ve already built and extend them to a new app. And that allows us to keep a lot of people much safer much more easily than having to spin up a whole bunch of new policies and implementations and enforcement.

It will also apply to content that you can pull in from other servers. But it’s important to note that the ActivityPub protocol leaves space for this. They are very clear, if you talk to the community, that different servers should have different policies and different guidelines. And they should be allowed to enforce those. And so yes, you can pull content from another server into your app. But then you can also decide not to show it or to block it in your app. If it violates your policies without blocking that content on the server from which it originated.

So how many posts are people going to be able to look at per day for free on Threads?

You have no limits, no limits on the number of posts per day for free.

Wait, you’re I could read 700, 800 posts. You’re not going to have one word to say about it?

I mean, thank you. I’ll send you a nice thank you emoji. I use the thank you emoji a lot.

I have not played around with threads yet. I am not in the beta testers group that already has access to the app. So I just want to know, to what degree is this going to look exactly like Twitter if I open it up? Are there multiple content formats supported? What is the character limit? What does this thing do that Twitter does not? And what does Twitter support that Threads does not right now? What are the big things?

I love this nerd. What’s the character limit?

500, next question.

OK, there we go.

It feels like a — it’s simpler than Twitter. I mean, Twitter has evolved over the years. I actually think that’s good. I was actually really excited when they started to play some bets and take some swings with some new features over the last couple of years. But right now, it’s just a very simple, clean app. It loads very quickly on Android and iOS. And there are text posts. You can attach what you’d expect to be able to attach — photos or videos. It does not have an inbox. So it does not have Spaces. It does not have a Communities tab. It doesn’t have a bunch of new features that the Twitter app has.

It’s just your feed of text first, then media attached, a search which only supports username search — You can’t even search posts content yet — the Composer itself — we love the idea of creativity being at the center of the app. We think that what we try to do at Instagram is inspire creativity that brings people together. And that’s true for Threads, too. It’s just about conversation specifically. So it’s the center of the app — Interactivity or Notifications, depending on what name you prefer, and then your profile. It’s really light, really simple, really clean.

I feel like these apps live and die in part based on what is the vibe. Something I have observed is, on Mastodon, the vibe is very, very serious. On Bluesky, the vibe is very silly. I don’t think there’s one technical feature of either app that explains either of those things. But I much prefer spending time on Bluesky because it seems like people are having fun there. Do you feel like you have any levers that you can pull to try to make Threads a fun place to hang out?

Yeah, our hope is to create a friendly place to hang out. There’s a number of different things. We’re bringing over a bunch of good tools we already have on Instagram, trying to raise more awareness of them. Hidden Words and Restrict are incredibly powerful if we use them properly. And they’re unique to us in a lot of different ways.

Obviously, we have other standard controls, like Mention and Reply Controls. I mean, this beta period right now is really trying to seed the experience with a bunch of people who are excited about the idea. And I’m hoping that they can help set the tone for the larger community. We’ll see how that goes.

Obviously, we can’t control the larger community. But right now, it’s just very friendly in there. Now, we’ll see what it looks like when the gates blow open and anyone and everyone can join. But the vibes are good in there right now. So we will see if we can maintain that over time.

Adam I have sort of a meta question for you, no pun intended. And it’s about this strategy that Facebook and Instagram have of cloning or borrowing either entire competitor apps or features from competitors’ apps. Some of these cloning attempts have been successful. I’m thinking about Instagram Reels and Stories. But there are also a lot of attempts that have not worked.

Some examples that come to mind include these attempted clones of Nextdoor, and Cameo, and a bunch of different dating apps. Those have not worked out and become huge standalone apps. So when you all are thinking about whether or not to clone a competitor’s app or a feature within an app, what is the probability that you need to be confident in that it will actually succeed? Does it have to be 50 percent likely to work in your mind to make it worth the effort of going through with cloning it?

I do think there’s two different ideas in that question. There is, what does it mean when you borrow the ideas of others? And then there’s also, how do you feel about risk-taking and the likelihood of success when you place any bet, whether it’s borrowing from others or not? So I’ll try to speak to both.

I do think it’s important to be able to give credit where it’s due and to incorporate lessons that others have learned into what you do. Ideally, most of the time, that doesn’t look like a clone. That looks like, OK, what are the things that we’ve learned from what they do and why they succeeded? How do those apply to what we do? And then how should we evolve forward?

But sometimes, the best way to do that is just, look, Stories is clearly a format that everyone is more comfortable sharing and most people are more comfortable sharing, and then Feed. And so we’re going to have to support that. Look, Snapchat gets the credit for popularizing that format. But it’s everywhere.

I mean, it’s in Pinterest. I think it was in Twitter for a while, YouTube. It’s just everywhere. That’s like saying Feeds — it’s like, well, was it Facebook that popularized it first? Was it Friend Feeds? We can all debate it. But at this point, Feeds are everywhere.

And so for me, Twitter, the thing that I think is really remarkably strong about the design of the experience is the Reply model. A lot of the other parts of what make Twitter Twitter exist in other apps — the following model, text first, or text only, simplicity, short character counts. There’s all different versions of these ideas. That Reply model I think has really, really been something that they should get a ton of credit for. And to me, I tried to figure out a way to squeeze that into the Instagram app. We did, as a team. And it just didn’t work. It just was just too confusing.

And by Reply model, you mean the fact that you can either reply to someone’s Tweet or Quote-Tweet them? And so their original tweet is included in with yours. Is that —

No, no. By Reply model, I mean that the reply is the same canonical unit as the initial post. It is not subordinate or secondary in any way. When you comment on something on YouTube or on Facebook, that comment is like a secondary piece of content and the post is the main piece of content. And so the conversation is relegated into the secondary position, into this less prominent place in the app or space, whereas, on Twitter, and on Mastodon, and on Bluesky, it is the content.

The conversation is the content. And that is just a flatter model. And I think it’s really good for public discourse. And so we tried to figure out a way to support that, to take that lesson and incorporate it into Feed. And it just didn’t work because we have comments. And you couldn’t just like, oh, let’s just make everything a comment. It just didn’t make any sense. So it ended up making more sense to build a separate space.

And in terms of risk, look, I don’t think you think about it on a per project basis. Teams do, obviously, because they usually work on one project. But if you’re managing a large team, a large organization, you need to think about, OK, how much stuff do we have that is almost definitely going to work, but the value is probably marginal? How much stuff do we have that’s like medium risk, medium value? And then what are our couple of moonshots?

And you kind of think about it as a portfolio. And you want to make sure you’re intentional about how you distribute your energy. You don’t want to have everything be super high beta. And then there would be a really high chance that everything just goes terribly. And the whole team is demoralized. And you’ve made no progress this year.

But if everything is a sure thing but probably a smaller, quick win, you’re probably not going to innovate fast enough to keep up with the world as it changes around you. So I think of this quite squarely in the bucket of really high risk but, if it succeeds, incredibly valuable and important type of project. It’s a small team, a few dozen people. Instagram isn’t that big, by the way. But this is still, for us, a smallish team. But if it works, what an amazing thing to be part of. So let’s take a swing and see how it goes.

Well, I was going to ask — you’ve been at Instagram for a while now. And I wonder where would you rank this in terms of swings that you have taken. Does this feel like the longest limb you’ve ever crawled out on? Or have there been other things that felt just as unlikely when you launched them?

This probably feels like the longest limb. I do think the work on Reels always felt very tough. On one hand, to be clear, short-form video was a huge part of Instagram long before I joined Instagram. And Reels is, I think, just an evolved version of short-form video.

But TikTok is just such a phenomenally intense, well-executed competitor. Just even trying to play in their space at all felt a lot like putting your neck out there. And we had some pretty big misses. We lost nine months because we tried to build it on top of Stories instead of building it into Feed because we didn’t want to complicate the app any further.

But it turned out most Stories people don’t actually view because there’s so many more Stories than there is time to view for most people. They view like 10 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent, whatever it is. And so it wasn’t a foundation that was sufficiently strong to build a really compelling short-form video product on top of. But we lost nine months, maybe a year.

What does the world look like if we had launched a year earlier and had a really compelling short-form video product before COVID-19 hit in March of 2020? I don’t know. But yeah, that one also felt — Reels has always felt a little bit like a lot of scrutiny, internally as well as externally.

I can imagine. Adam, you’re here to talk about Threads. And we’ve talked a lot about that. I want to ask you one question about Twitter because you, I think, are one of the Meta/Facebook/Instagram executives who has most used Twitter.

You’ve been in there for years, mixing it up, and, I think, are somewhat rare in that regard. What do you make of Twitter since Elon Musk took over? Are you sad? Are you mad? Are you energized? As a long-time user of Twitter, maybe taking off your Instagram hat for a second, what do you think about the changes on the platform in the past year?

Look, I like Twitter a lot. The things that I don’t like about Twitter are 100 percent of my own making. I decided to try to engage with our biggest critics on Twitter 10 years ago. And so I followed all of them. And so the fact that it was a difficult, dark place for me was 100 percent a result of the decisions I made about who to follow. But I always enjoyed it.

Including me and Kevin.

Yeah, definitely. Oh yeah, definitely.

It’s always a mistake to follow us.

Yeah. I’d be lying if I never questioned some of my previous decisions on follows. But look, I thought it was great. It was so clearly a vibrant community — well, actually, a couple of different communities layered on top of each other. And one of them is the community of journalists who spend a ton of time there talking about whatever it is that they’re passionate about.

And it felt right to show up in a space that was really not my territory, but was really journalist territory, to talk to journalists about what we were doing at Facebook at the time. And so I always really appreciated that. And new ownership, new way of operating, there’s risks with that. And there’s also opportunity with that. You can shake things up. You can break through local maximum. You can consider new ideas that you always should have that you, for some reason, never did. But then you can also make mistakes. And so I don’t know. I wouldn’t count them out at all. I think there’s a lot going in their favor.

And history has shown us that network effects are incredibly strong, not only for social networks, but for everything — for cities, how people work, any groups of people. But I’ll be excited to see how they evolve over the next couple of years. I would bet that looks pretty different in two years than it looks now. What it looks like, I do not know.

Last question, Adam, I promise it’s really quick. We know that Elon Musk is mad that y’all are launching this app. Should it come to it, are you prepared to fight him in a cage?

I’m going to leave that to those guys. That’s between those guys. I’m going to focus on — this is why I’ve really got to go. I’m going to focus on getting this thing out the door, making sure that it’s fast and works really well. And I’ll let them engage on the rest.

That sounds good. Adam, thanks so much for coming on “Hard Fork.”

Yeah. Thanks, Adam.

Thank you. Appreciate your time.

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“Hard Fork” is produced by Rachel Cohn and Davis Land. We’re edited by Jen Poyant. Today’s show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley, original music by Dan Powell and Rowan Niemisto. Special thanks to Paula Szuchman, Pui-Wing Tam, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us, as always, at [email protected].

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