Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't jump to conclusions. They're likely not launching in EU because EU requires user data be stored in EU, and their current launch stack is hosted elsewhere, look at this datacenter map of Meta: https://datacenters.atmeta.com/ They're mostly in the US, and most outside the EU. Given the record timeline from concept to launch for this app, it's normal they can't whip up a datacenter from nothing overnight.
Maybe it's because I grew up on IRC and ICQ, but I just cannot imagine an asynchronous text-based social network to require a full datacenter of the same scale as their video and ad-track platforms. I kinda assume that Meta could do this if they wanted. Their Instagram and Facebook comments are legal and available in the EU no problem.
- Yes Instagram and Facebook are legal and available in EU (as I noted), but there's one data center in Ireland and one in Denmark as far as I see, and given the massive influx of users to Threads, they probably have no extra capacity on these two datacenters to cover all of EU with a new app, not right now at least. Compare with SEVENTEEN datacenters in the US.
- "Full datacenter" doesn't mean much. When we say "a datacenter" it doesn't mean a building of specific size and capacity. They likely collocate some servers in other people's data centers (in fact many of those are like that).
- IRC and ICQ still require a network of servers. IRC is a protocol that barely changes so you don't need as much centralization as with a product of rapid iteration and innovation as modern social networks. But you still must be quite familiar with IRC splits and lag, which comes with such architecture. If a social network broke as often as IRC did, people would simply not use it, modern audience have higher expectations. Resilience requires redundancy and more resource-intensive architectures.
- Modern social networks have way more people on, than IRC ever did. At the peak of IRC use, around 2004-2005 all networks, all servers, total, had about 10 million users. Today they're just about 350k. Compare with Threads, which gained 30 million+ users in ONE DAY. More users mean you need more servers and beefier servers, and more serious architecture (as things don't scale linearly by magic beyond a threshold).
- IRC has no content to host at all. How'd you publish a photo to the world on IRC? You can't. Or even text? I guess everyone has to be in the channel, or know where to find some logs? ICQ is also mostly peer to peer. If you lose your copy of the chat logs, that's it. At least how it was in the 90s when it was popular and I used it (I hear it's still popular in Russia or something? Dunno). So you can't compare social media with a peer-to-peer ephemeral messaging protocol. The peer-to-peer messaging protocol is a tiny part of what Twitter and Threads do.
- I haven't even mentioned algorithmic timelines and the like, which make the task even more complicated, nothing like IRC.
And then to pay for all these costs of hosting and algorithmic distribution, backup and so on, you need to collect said user data, profile ads, run the ad network UI and so on. That also adds to the cost and resource use of running this service.
We can probably discuss "is all this needed, can't we go back to something like IRC"? And I think about this a lot. The modern social media design is not the best way to do it, it's not the final way. But Meta wanted to clone Twitter, not IRC, and this comes with the cost & system requirements of running something like Twitter.