2y ago

Instagram’s Threads surpasses 100 million users

www.theverge.com Instagram’s Threads surpasses 100 million users

But will the users stick around?

80 comments

How many active user? I'm one of those people who used the app for few minutes before removing it
- @small44, did you already have an Instagram account and get automatically signed up? Just curious if that is what they are doing to get so many users.
  
  What they're doing is making it very easy to sign up. You just need to go to your Instagram and click a few buttons and you've created a threads account.
  
  I believe that it's creating the threads account based on your Instagram credentials just like you get signed up on many sites without your Google account
- I know my friends posted at least something when it launched then went along with their lives like nothing happened.
  
  Threads needs to be BANNED from lemmy and kbin and Federation whatever mindboggle NOW. FIGHT BACK!!! DESTROY THE HORRID THREADS, MUSK AND ZUCC!!!!!

By automatically signing up Instagram 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.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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.

It would be great to see how many of those users have actually stayed after using it one time.
- They cannot leave threads. The only way to leave threads is to nuke your instagram account.
- Might just become another Google Plus situation.

With such a mass of users, all those people now only have one thing in common: they are consumers. That's the only point of the platform, grouping these people and feeding them ads.
The comments are merely a distraction between two ads.
This is why there is a good reason for keeping a little barrier of entry to the fediverse: this barrier is also a barrier to advertisers.
- I'm new to the whole fediverse thing, so how would you create a barrier to entry apart from individual instances not federating with instances they see as abusive?
  
  Signing up for threads is a lot easier than it is to sign up for usual lemmy or kbin instances. If they have an Instagram account then it's already automated.
  If they want to interact here they'd have to create an account for a place like this instead of being able to use their thread account. Which is probably what is meant by barrier to entry. They can't go and use their meta instance. I'm assuming they can't view content from the equivalent of their all, and would have to view it by going directly to the link. So just stuck in lurker mode.
  
  The barrier is picking a tool, then picking an instance, then accepting that the crowd is somewhere else. threads makes this automatic for you. Even "knowing" that there is another tool is a barrier.

Wild that this product is getting so much attention (and so many new users), despite being so uninteresting.
- We don't like it, but it shows what these social media plattforms can have for power. They can just shit out millions of users, even if it's not the exact number in this thread, compared to a few thousands of people we managed to fill the Fediverse with.
  Now, if it holds up in value and so on, how much the average user contributes is another meassure. But it's hard to deny the power of these huge plattforms to a worrying degree.
- Ultimately, there's a lot of demand for basic social media that's relatively simple, unobtrusive, isn't being wielded by a megalomaniac for his culture war issue du jour, and has all the people and friends you're interested in.
  Given Twitter's self-immolation, I'm not really that surprised.

I was wondering why I didn't hear about Threads. But apparently it's not available in Europe due to privacy concerns.
- Yup, it literally canny comply with EU GDPR requirements. Sadly, while we theorecticaly have nearly the same laws grandfathered in in the UK, they're not enforced post brexit
  
  Add it to the pile of the brexit benefits. Your sovereignty to use threads is intact.
- Imagine the UK people trapped on an app talking about US politics 100% of the time. No downtime anymore. No rest, no nothing. It will be governor@florida non-stop.

Downloaded it myself and used it for about a day. Really not impressed by it at all.
- I'm not a fan of the way the feed is basically 99% accounts I don't follow
  
  this is exactly the issue I had. I started muting accounts for about 30 minutes and then just gave up

It seems like an Instagram with less users mostly.

I would not want to be Elon Musk's underwear right now.

"Users"

No thanks.

And if you believe that, you'll surely be interested in this fine nautical spanning structure in Brooklyn, very inexpensive I might add.

Disappointing but not surprising.

Is it threads good or bad for the fediverse?
It feels like that zucc wants to swallow it all both the fediverse and twitter altogether. And if he doesn't successed - at least he will do some damage to twitter.. has nothing to lose
- it's bad. he will steamroll the fediverse, make everyone want to go to his platform ("look at the features we have that they don't! its ok tho, we still federate with them, so come here!") and once he gets the majority of people there, which he honestly already has, he will defederate from everyone. he will once again go back to being a centralized platform, killing a large portion of the fediverse along with it.

80 comments