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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Then my guess is a lot of users are seeing something new and clicking along out of curiosity. Then they walk away and don’t look at it again :-)
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!!!
Threads do not do posts. They do twits, or what is called on kbin microblogs. As such Lemmy can not be affected and kbin can only be affected in the microblog section.
what about mastodon? last time i looked there it looked very similiar to twitter so
Yes, but reply above me was specifically about lemmy and kbin. Mastodon will be affected, unless they defederate.
The point of ActivityPub should be to become as widespread as possible so as to proliferate the standard and eliminate silos and walled gardens–including Facebook and its ilk. It would be an unambiguously good thing if Meta’s (and Tumblr’s) move towards interoperability cascades to the other big platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit.
You could follow (or choose not to follow) users on any platform you want, from any platform you want.
Having a single player control most of the market - like meta - means that they will have a lot of sway over how the protocol is developed. This is propably a bad thing since meta har different goals than people currently using the fediverse and also have financial incentives to get people to move over to their platforms instead.
The problem is, walled gardens helps lock-in users. Meta and Twitter et al want lock-in. It only takes the CEO to decide they don’t wanna play nicely and boom, back to walled gardens again.
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.
Gotcha. I’ve just now seen that threads doesn’t support activitypub. I thought that the entire idea was to integrate with platforms like these, but oh well what did I expect :D
Still curious to see if they actually implement it and how it’s going to turn out for them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Users”
No thanks.
I would not want to be Elon Musk’s underwear right now.
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 loseit’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.
