Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince posted a graph to both Threads and Twitter today (Cloudflare’s communications VP Daniella Vallurupalli confirmed it was him) showing what he says is Twitter’s DNS ranking from January to now. It’s, uh, not a great story! Twitter alternative Threads, meanwhile, has been growing explosively — it’s less than three million from the 100 million user mark. It debuted on Wednesday.
On a side note: Why is this image (from Threads, don’t know the version accessible on Twitter, as it’s not accessible to me) a JPEG, and a very much compressed one, too? You see non-tech people sharing screenshot JPEGs all the time, but they are usually in okay quality and only degrade when shared and edited a lot. This one is basically unreadable from the beginning, and it’s posted by a guy who studied computer science and leads a leading tech company since 14 years. Or is it really Threads transcoding and downgrading images so much?
In the meantime I remembered the existence of Nitter (and that it still works!), and there the screenshot is a JPEG, too, but in much better quality (https://nitter.net/pic/orig/media%2FF0mvPmYaYAEUxU9.jpg). So it seems like, yes, the tech CEO publicly posts graph images as JPEG, but he does it in good quality, and it’s the photo sharing community’s microblogging service that kills the image uploads there by compressing them to death.
Instagram completely mangles image quality, and Threads seems to be tied into Instagram stuff on the back-end, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what’s happening here.