I love to try all the new things. And, I miss my math teacher friends and conversations. So, when a friend asked me to join Threads with them, I immediately hopped on! I was encouraged when I first signed up, as sign up was seamless. Threads is attached to Instagram, so you can automatically follow your Instagram friends who have already signed up. This meant I started Threads with about 35 followers, and many of them were math teachers. I was encouraged, but then greatly disappointed in Threads.

I am not a fan of Threads

There are no hashtags in Threads. In Mastodon I can click on a hashtag (and even follow hashtags) when I want to learn things or follow/participate in a conversation. This is a deal breaker for me.

Your feed is full of garbage. I am looking for a feed full of math educators, not ads and verified celebrities and people and accounts that I never followed in the first place. I don’t want to have to parse through all of that garbage in order to find posts I want to read, and people that I am trying to interact with.

I opened my feed and read the few posts from my friends. And that is where the fun ended. Because after the 5 posts from my friends, my feed was full of verified posts from advertisers and celebrities, like Paris Hilton. I had not followed any of these people. So, I began muting these posts, hoping to get more posts from people I had actually followed, but the more I muted, the more that appeared. It is similar to Instagram, where when you are “all caught up”, you just get suggested posts. I’ve never been a huge fan of Instagram, and this is exactly what Threads feels like.

I am looking for a place for all of my math education conversations, and Threads is not where that is going to happen. I will stay on Threads for now, mostly to tell people to come over the mastodon, as I am having fabulous mathy conversations there! If you want to reconnect with math educators, come over to Mathstodon! We would love to see you there!