Yesterday, I embarked on what may be a terrible and, in the end, short-lived new venture. I don’t know how long I will last. It don’t know how long it will last. But it felt like a good idea at the time and I am going into it with some specific personal boundaries that were previously lacking.

I came off Twitter some while ago and since deleted my account entirely with no intention of going back on. I do not feel at all the poorer for having done so. I came off Facebook entirely some while ago too. My account is still live, but only because WordPress automatically pings my blog posts to a page, which requires an account to keep working. I am not really there, but my account remains live for that reason. If WordPress stops talking to Facebook, that will probably go by the wayside too. I even have an Instagram account, but I’m not really much of a picture taker – it’s another place to publicise my blog. I occasionally go on it, but not with any real frequency.

Well, having been pretty much off all of these platforms – and barely having ever gone on Instagram – I decided that maybe I should give Threads a bash. Threads was created by Facebook a few years ago as an alternative and/or rival to Twitter. I never bothered with it in the past because it seemed to just replicate what Twitter was doing, but with fewer users. But since more and more people have been jumping off Twitter, and Elon Musk seems to have gone on a personal mission to devalue the platform as much as possible, quite a number of high profile figures and not a few MPs have decided to leave Twitter, or scale back use, and join Threads or Bluesky.

Anyway, a combination of using Instagram a very little bit and the fact that many more are jumping into Threads now, I thought I would give it a go. I don’t intend to get any push notifications or anything like that. I will probably use it only on my computer and see how I get on. We’ll see what happens. So far, it looks exactly like twitter and seems to operate much like twitter. That suggests it may well end up suffering from exactly the same problems of twitter and my little recce may end no sooner than it began. But I’m going to give it a bash and see what happens.

If you’re on there, see if you can find me. We can discover together how long it lasts.