Yes, I think this is the right direction. Although it still feels like a competitor for twitter rather than reddit / discord.

The latter tend to have communities as the driving force. Then the threads (community discussions) would be one tool that the community can use, along with their own token for rewards etc.

Thinking along the lines of discord, I think it could be easier to sign up communities who bring users with them than sign up users individually.

But the offering for the community needs to be strong. All the tools you need to run a web3 style community but simple user experience.

This probably means native tokens and NFTs, rather than relying on hive-engine.

It may even be cleaner as a fork of hive entirely, to separate from the long-form approach, although these things are very hard to get off the ground.