After a volatile but ultimately successful year with its investments in virtual-reality hardware and software, Meta is set to release its Twitter competitor, Threads, tomorrow. Can Threads present a meaningful alternative to Twitter, given the latter’s precarious finances and general tumult under Elon Musk’s ownership?

Highly paid consultants must have determined that the answer is “Yes,” but it’s hard to imagine on what basis. Considering network effects — consumers derive more value from a service the more consumers there are using it — and path dependence — an equilibrium is reached due to past events — one is hard-pressed to explain why Threads will succeed where Mastodon, Truth Social, Parler, and Gab have foundered.

People use Twitter because people are using Twitter. A lot of people: 335.7 million, according to Statista. Twitter is differentiated from other social networks by who uses the app and how they use it. In Musk’s own words, “the really profound thing is what Twitter has is roughly 130 million hours of the smartest, most influential people on earth—every single day.” Journalists, actors, government officials, musicians, and public intellectuals of all sorts — i.e., the bohemia and intelligentsia — use Twitter to communicate their ideas directly to their followers.

The point? Twitter has attracted an elite cohort of users who use the app to effectively relay their arguments, articles, and remarks to a politically and intellectually engaged audience. Meta’s apps do not serve this role: Facebook is for inchoate political tirades and baby photos (if you’re over the age of 40); Instagram is for misleading photos of your lavish lifestyle (if you’re under the age of 90); and Messenger is for texting people without iPhones.

An Instagram user, of which there are an estimated 1.35 billion, is marginally more likely to use Threads because of the ease of logging in with one’s pre-existing IG account. But what good is ease-of-access if the product is one for which there’s little demand to access? Not much good at all; the people who would use Threads already use Twitter.

Perhaps Threads can beat Twitter by offering for free tools like TweetDeck, which Musk is making available only to paid subscribers in August, and by not placing a cap on the number of posts its users can see. Still, these vertical differentiators are rendered moot if people aren’t engaging on the app to begin with.

We’ve gone down the Twitter path, so even if Threads turns out to be better, we’re likely to continue down it. That is, so long as the path still exists. Unlike Meta, Twitter has fiscal issues: Ad sales constitute 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue; for the five-week period from April 1 to early May, they were down 59 percent year-over-year, as reported by the New York Times. If Twitter can no longer afford to operate it servers, Threads can rescue those jumping overboard from the sinking bird app. Until and unless this happens, the threads on Threads are bound to be sparse and short.