Instagram’s Threads surpasses 100 million users

I don't think that's true. You can sign up using your Instagram account, but I don't think it happens automatically. Instagram has 1.4B active users for reference.

It creates shadow placeholder profiles. You need to "sign up" but it's more like activating your threads profile rather than making a new account since it uses the same account database as Instagram. When I joined, it let me follow all of the people I follow on Instagram, even though 95% of them didn't have a threads account. Instead it put them in a pending list, automatically following them once they sign into the app and activate their profile for the first time.
- What makes you think the shadow accounts are part of the 100M figure? The Android app alone is already in the 50M+ downloads band.
- The point is that all of those 100 million people did make an active decision and take active steps to create an account. I'm not sure why Meta making the sign-up process very easy is meant to be a criticism.
  
  The criticism is more that 100 million people are willing to sign up for another Meta product.
  
  It's shocking that people still use their apps, given how awful the company is.
  
  Honestly, it's not really all that shocking. People LOVE social media, that's just the way it is. Plus, having a social is practically required in this day and age for any business, big or small to advertise and get the word out. Sure, Facebook/Meta is shady and untrustworthy, but we are far beyond the point of trusting companies anymore. People are willing to be part of the social universe in any way in order to stay informed and relevant. I mean, how many terrible things has Facebook done with user data? Yet, the layman/woman will still use the platform since it's just so popular. I don't use Facebook at all, but if I want to sell something quickly, where am I going? Facebook Marketplace.
  
  Finally, there's Elon. People were happy with twitter and Elon just had to blow it up in order to feed his ego. That turned off advertisers and influencers (the people making the engaging content) and therefore, anybody following that content subsequently moved on to the next thing. It's insane but in making such a mess of things, Elon pretty much convinced people that threads was the better alternative.
  
  Social Media isn't just another part of the internet anymore, it effectively is the internet. Even forum and link-aggregation sites are leaning more into the practices of social media since it is all-encompassing in the modern world. I don't blame those 100 million people for switching to threads, what else was gonna happen?
- And the thing is they are reporting the number of shadow accounts they create. If I were a meta investor I would be looking for a class action right about now.
  
  I don't think they are because if they were the number of accounts they report would be 1.4 billion and not 100 million.
  
  You should remember that there's a lot of numbers between 0 and 1.4 billion - say, 100 million.
  
  Why would they not pad their numbers if they cannot meaningfully be held accountable?
  If padding with X users is projected to generate the most profit, then they are going to do just that.
  
  I can't say whether or not they're lying about their numbers, just that they're definitely not reporting "shadow accounts" (Instagram accounts who haven't activated a Threads profile but can still be followed) as active users.
  
  They are accountable to their board of directors though, just like when that IRL app was found to be padding their numbers with bots last month and shut down.

If it's automatic shouldn't the number of user be the same as the number of Instagram user?

When you login initially it offers to follow all your Instagram follows. Even if they've never logged in. Its creating shadow accounts for all of them.

When they login initially they find they already have a bunch of followers.

So it's not all of Instagram. It's just all the people who've tried it + all the people they tried to follow.
- I'd love a citation for that.
  
  If it only took a single one of your followers signing up for Threads to make a "shadow account" for you, I'd imagine the number of accounts would basically be the same as the number of Instagram accounts.
  
  It's simply a database. Your account is in the database and the threads account is an attribute of it marked as "activated" or "not activated". After that it's just a matter of counting the activated accounts.
  
  Sure, but they're not reporting the number of Instagram accounts. They're reporting the number of, to borrow your term, 'activated' Threads accounts, which only happens when the user makes active and intentional steps to download the Threads app and sign into it.
  
  I don't think it's that wild to call that "signing up for Threads" and reporting it as such.
  
  That really doesn't need to be known, we could tell just from average daily active user counts. If those weren't provided, that's a big red flag on the rest of their numbers because there's no reason not to include those numbers. Active users is the most accurate measure. They might reasonably choose to hype the signups number, but if everyone wants to know actives and it's not provided, that's Meta choosing to hide the information. Not a confident move.
- So you're saying they are going out of their way to commit fraud on a scale that would trigger an SEC investigation of a publicly traded company, rather than you just making up the way something works? You do understand how you can have such placeholders not be included in the number of active users...right?
Not saying that it's automatic, but even if it was they didn't launch threads in all the same markets.
So it's not all of Instagram. It's just all the people who've tried it + all the people they tried to follow.

It was stated in this thread there are, "1.4 billion Instagram accounts*" Not all of them are active. These so called reported sign ups are active people who are trying out Threads and likely dropping it quickly after.

At the ass end of it, Threads is using your already made Instagram account and I think to this moment, it's still unavailable in Europe. I do not plan to use it because I lack an Insta so I can not verify when it will be available.

That’s not true. You still have to manually add your Instagram account to Threads. These are genuine signups. It’s been all over the news as the fastest growing app of all time.

It's been a bit disappointing to see how quickly reason and facts are going out the window on Kbin just because "Meta bad". I genuinely expected a little better.

Meta can be bad, and Threads can genuinely be popular. These aren't contradictory, and it's been funny, if sad, to see the mental hoops people are jumping through to try to explain away how Threads clearly must be a terrible failure actually.
- No kidding. It's always cute when people who made a webpage one time try to explain (make up) how user accounting must be working in a publicly traded company.
"had to be true, I saw it on the news" is an extremely naive take.

Journalist's are experts in one thing. It isn't technology or social media. Go hop on threads, there's not half the population of the US participating FFS. It's patently obvious. Moreover it isn't illegal. Why wouldn't they misreport?
- participating =/= signed up at check it out at one point
  
  Being followed by an idiot != Signing up an account
  
  I can create a billion accounts on my social media instance. Should that matter? No? So why does it matter that Meta did?
  
  Do you have any evidence at all that Instagram accounts who have a follower that signed up for Threads are being included in this number?
  
  Also, lying to your investors is very illegal, actually, and just about the single most reliable way for a rich person to actually go to jail. Just ask Elizabeth Holmes.
- Instagram has like over a billion users. They definitely aren't automatically signing people up.
  
  Don’t know if they are or not but remember they can’t offer threads in all of Europe so if they were automatically signing accounts up they couldn’t include European accounts

I think it's more that you need to download the app to see what's going on there and there's almost no friction to sign in if you're already on Instagram. It's a deliberate FOMO play that's actually kind of brilliant and seems to be working out well.