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Instagram’s Threads surpasses 100 million users (www.theverge.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/tech@kbin.social
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[–] 27 points 3 years ago (2 children)

How many active user? I'm one of those people who used the app for few minutes before removing it

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    @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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I know my friends posted at least something when it launched then went along with their lives like nothing happened.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Threads needs to be BANNED from lemmy and kbin and Federation whatever mindboggle NOW. FIGHT BACK!!! DESTROY THE HORRID THREADS, MUSK AND ZUCC!!!!!

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  • [–] 12 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    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.

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    • [–] 26 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    By automatically signing up Instagram users.

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  • [–] 28 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 33 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago (3 children)

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

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago

    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?

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  • [+] 8 points 3 years ago (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    "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?

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago

    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.

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    • [–] 12 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    It would be great to see how many of those users have actually stayed after using it one time.

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    • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    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.

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    • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I was wondering why I didn't hear about Threads. But apparently it's not available in Europe due to privacy concerns.

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    [–] 7 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Wild that this product is getting so much attention (and so many new users), despite being so uninteresting.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    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.

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    • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Downloaded it myself and used it for about a day. Really not impressed by it at all.

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    • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    It seems like an Instagram with less users mostly.

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    [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    "Users"

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