At this point it has to be intentional from these companies.
Because some basic data analysis should show that while the majority of content are comments and shorter posts made from mobile devices, but posts with self-created media beyond meme-templates, longer text posts, etc. tend to be more from computers. And more extensive moderation also often comes from desktop.
Third-party data suggests that Threads may have lost many more than half of its active users. Daily active users for Threads on Android dropped from 49 million on July 7 to 23.6 million on July 14, and then to 12.6 million on July 23, web analytics company SimilarWeb reported.
It’s what should have been expected though. Lots of people check it out during the hype, and later only those who actually found it useful/interesting/fun remain.
Most of the hype-launched services should have similar numbers.
It was absolutely expected, look at how Zuck frames it in the article. "More than they expected" stayed. They were parading the 100Million sign ups to brag, nobody thought all those people would stay.
“we'll focus on growing the community to the scale we think is possible. Only after that will we work on monetization. We've run this playbook many times before—with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Stories, Reels, and more—and this is as good of a start as we could have hoped for, so I'm really happy with the path we're on here.”
Well, it's still Facebook owned after all, and given that Facebook still exists, it's kind of redundant with it. Many of the people who were on Twitter (like myself) were on it because it WASN'T Facebook or Facebook owned, and so we wouldn't go to that platform anyway.
Plus, it's not the only competitor out there, although to be fair, there's way too many competitors right now, and it needs to whittle down to like 3 big ones or so. And these ones should be friendly to apolitical types, moderates, and sane conservatives.
Like it or not, online liberals such as ourselves are the vocal minority. Most people in life (and even on the net, even though the internet trends more liberal) aren't as politically motivated as some in the Fediverse would assume. We're in a bubble / echo chamber. Especially on Lemmy / Kbin and Mastodon.
Reddit and Twitter are both heavily liberal, as is here in the fediverse. FB is a mixed bag, but I think you're assumption that liberals are the vocal minority is incorrect. More liberals use the internet than the dying breed of conservatives.
While this is true, early adopters—those who stay, use, promote new services and keep them active— tend to belong to the nerd and techies subgroups. Who are the most likely to care about privacy. Threads simply didn't offer anything of value and demanded to take your soul and life for eternity. Ultimately, if the tech savvy people don't stay to explain and ease the adoption of the platform, that's when the people who don't care about privacy leave.