This might help explain the spectacular launch of Threads
Automatically creating a shadow account for everyone on Instagram?
Even allowing people to follow that account?
Sounds like they really wanted to push Threads out the door in a big way.
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I fucking KNEW it.
35 million users my asshole - they’re just counting existing Instagram accounts.
Pretty sure they’re not. I mean those are instagram accounts, but only those who enabled threads. It’s also at 93 million now.
Why is it so hard to believe that people download the app and try it out? It’s easy to do, users don’t have to create a new account, the app is number one on the App Store, they’re probably advertising it in instagram, and it’s still just 20% of the instagram userbase.
Decentralization is nice, but most people don’t care about it and it’s too complicated or annoying to sign up there. Threads is dead simple and people want a Twitter replacement. It’s also "just" a fifth of the Twitter userbase.
Most of the people just care for "the hot new thing" some just dislike twitter more, some are forced by friends to use it (me :( )
Is kinda weird seeing so many people on Lemmy just do not trust any data from social media.
The things of the fediverse is that everything is too complicated, seeing my friends signups for Threads they just downloaded 1 app, and max 7 clicks and they made an account, they thought Mastodon was too hard to use :(
Friends don't make friends sign up for social media.
It's weird to not distrust Meta, if you can't see that idk what to tell you. In 70 years when a company is using detailed data collected about you since you were 13 to market nostalgia it'll be too late. Even if laws get implemented in the interum between now and then banning data harvesting, whatever data is collected today will still be on the market and you'll be an even juicier target.
It isn't very easy to get hold of for the "uninitiated". Which is partially a good thing, in my opinion. Meaningful interactions require effort.
Barriers to entry improve the quality of participants.
Setting things up on fediverse is overly complicated and could be made easier.
The biggest problem is it really isn't all that clear what the pros and cons are various instances are, and the truth is that for the most part with the exception of a few particular instances it really doesn't matter.
What might make the most sense is to have a website people can sign up on and then it just registers their account on one of a few instances to spread the load. Obviously that list I would have to be curated so it didn't include obvious problematic instances,but it wouldn't be that hard to do that. And that would make it as easy as threads is which basically is just an instance when all said and done.
And even if you do understand the pros and cons, it can be complicated because all these instances have differences and you have to figure out which one has the things you want and potentially make compromises.
Eg, I knew I absolutely must have downvotes and several instances disable those. I wanted to be federated with both lemmy.world and beehaw (and also lower my risk that beehaw is gonna defederate my instance in the future). I wanted as large of an instance as possible because by "fun" design, the "all" feed gets better the bigger the instance (IMO a design flaw), as does the ease of subscribing to communities (being first to subscribe is harder).
Something that would make it massively easier is portable/decentralised identities, or at least easy account migration. This should go for communities as well so that a community can exist independently of an instance, or be migrated to another instance with subscribers being redirected seamlessly.
Why?
Because Instagram did the same BS with their “Notes” feature recently and now nobody uses it.
You were automatically enrolled and it showed up on your feed and three months later, it’s crickets.
As much as I hate Twitter, I don’t think Threads is going to make a dent in the long run.
I don’t see how that’s related to them lying about user numbers, which I really don’t think they are doing.
We’ll see where threads will be in a few months, I’m sure not everyone will stay active there.
I’m not sure how you can see it any other way.
They had a successful platform (Instagram) and piggybacked a new platform on top and are counting the users toward their numbers.
If Zuckerbag released Threads without being tied to Instagram, it’d be a queef in the wind of a userbase.
It’s a clever strategy. For sure. I won’t pretend it’s not.
But seeing how “Notes” went - I don’t think it’s gonna go very far.
It’s like if McDonald’s started selling hotdogs from their stores under a separate store within their restaurants.
“McDog’s has over 1 billion served!”
No, McDonald’s does - you just put another product under the same roof by a different name.