I’m actually surprised no one has pointed out the design flaw in the logo. It looks like a close window x button on browsers, especially iOS Safari. I keep wanting to close out of the window by clicking on it instead of the smaller other x.
I can imagine that a bunch of those are astroturfing usernames. Businesses, celebrities and the like have a big deal of value in their online identity.
On general, yes, however threads uses your Instagram username. I think it's just initial excitement to try something new and people getting on the anti - X / twitter / Elon train and then realising that the network effect has way more pull
I believe Instagram usernames are reserved on Threads to ensure people can keep the same handle on both networks, but the users aren’t automatically signed up with a profile.
even if that were true - it wouldn't make sense. That would would a) create a huge disparity between signups and DAU b) they did make the signup process very frictionless which would explain the signups better and c) I believe it threads signups were in the millions whereas Instagram has over 1B accounts