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.
Fuck Meta and all but this isn't news. Meta litterally said straight up that they would be doing this before threads ever launched. If you have an instagram account then that is also your threads account. This isn't some conspiracy it's exactly what they told everyone they were doing. It's no diferent than linked accounts for google services.
Yeah this Threads issue is getting into the tin foil delusional territory now. Just as you said. They literally say "well use your Instagram acccount" of you bother to read their disclaimers they literally tell you that they are literally using your Instagram account. It's "Threads by Instagram". When you first log in it ll import all your Instagram contacts and you cna "follow" them. And if they don't have it yet it'll say "you'll follow as soon as they join threads" there is no "Shadow Threads account, because they are using the Instagram account.".
You can definitely be against threads and Meta. I Personally am not super thrilled about it. But there is way more than enough to hate a out meta and threads without making stuff up.
I think the difference is that the Threads user count keeps getting thrown around as an indicator of its success and viability, but it's not a great KPI.
I do think people are using this "realization" of accounts being automatically created as a conspiratorial gotcha, but it's still important to remind people of this scenario as they evaluate their prospects.
Exactly, and that's the reason why deleting a Threads account also deletes the Instagram account. Because there is only one account for both services.
Thank you for saying it.
It's a conspiracy just in the sense that they are seemingly counting these towards their growth numbers. If they're saying they have 20 million accounts, but they created 3/4 of them as placeholders, then no...they have 5 million accounts.
I really think they are not, those are all account from people who have actively signed up. Threads really is that much bigger than Mastodon, and it's not that surprising.
Presumably they would have created ~2 Billion Threads accounts since there are ~2B Instagram users. Even if it was just the US there are approximately ~115M Instagram account.
So no, the 70M user number would just be the number to actually try Threads.
They’re not creating a shadow account, you’re literally logging in with your instagram account.
What this post is implying, is that the user numbers are just existing instagram accounts, which doesn’t make sense because in that case they’d have 2 billion users within the first second.
You can follow/request to follow before the user has actually "created" the account, so they’re lying about which users have done that already, not about how many users they actually have.
Come at me downvotes
You can't really follow someone until they've made an account. Threads has an option where you can go into settings and find a list of your Instagram following list. From there, you can make it so you follow certain people as soon as they join Threads.
I hate meta just like the next person, but I‘m not sure how that’s supposed to boost accounts, since you’re literally just seeing these once you already have the account.
They are of course using their advantage in providing you your existing following list /followers. And they’re definitely happy to push it, but this post is implying something that strikes me as plain wrong.
I think you're right. It looks like Instagram too. I feel like it's Instagram with a focus on words.
Now we know why it was not launched in EU.
Why does everything have to be a conspiracy with some people? Threads literally and directly explains that it uses your Instagram account. They're the same account. Nothing crazy. No magic. No oogie boogie. Just the same account.
You need to activate the threads account. People are being asked to follow accounts which haven't been activated IE created.
You're missing the point.
So think of it like a 'feature' of Instagram then. You can enable the feature or you can leave it disabled but either way its sharing user data and login information etc.
I don't think I'm missing any point. Have you used it? They're owned by the same company. Threads is separate but part of Instagram. Other than the user name being reserved on Threads in case the Instagram user wants to sign up, there isn't an account created. If you try to search the name of any of those accounts in Threads it doesn't come up at all. (Edit: mistyped a word)
It definitely is oogie boogie, which is what makes it illegal in europe as it's against gdpr, which is why it's not available in europe.
They're doing some dodgy stuff with your data, that's for sure. But the sign-up is smooth. Instagram has a LOT of users, and Meta is leveraging that and making it super easy to share to IG that you have made said threads account (and if you don't, they will do it for you). The FOMO is real.
They have taken the biggest challenge to use a new social media platform, rebuilding your spidery web of follows, mutuals, weird interests, and friends, and made it basically transparent. It's a UX marvel. The sign-up numbers reflect that IMO.
None of the data other than the user name is shown in Threads until the user from Instagram activates their account. I've tried to look up a number of the people from Instagram on Threads and if they haven't signed up, then the search results are zero.
Being able to use the same credentials for logging in is something else than creating a public profile for users that never signed up for the service.
It's basically just a new feature for Instagram, but in a new app because it's too different from the standard Instagram feed.
Also if you click one of the users who haven't signed up yet it just pre-queues your follow and says "You'll automatically follow then when/if they join threads"(I don't remember the exact wording here). This is blown out of proportion.
Your correct in a technical sense (eccept for mabe the fetaverse linkages) but not a semantic one,
Yes its absolutely technically true that people delete their unified account from the "other place to do so called threads account management page"
but semantically its a "new service" that they were "signed up for" with its own app, and if/when they delete their "threads account" everything else goes with it for some odd reason
Facebook and their dumb opaqeness
It's not creating a "shadow account", it is literally the same account. Threads is just a different frontend for what already existed with Instagram. And Meta would've been stupid, if they wouldn't have use what they already have.
Oh for sure, but it does make me wonder how accurate the sign up reports are.
Does Threads report people who actually sign up and "claim" their "shadow accounts," or does it count actual accounts and "shadow accounts?" The former is definitely a more accurate count, while the latter is basically numbers padding.
My understanding, it is reporting people who specifically elect to sign up for Threads using their Instagram account. On instagram profiles, they have been showing a badge with their Threads subscriber number that you only get when you elect to join Threads. This increases sequentially.
The highest number on the badge should give a good indication of how many Instagram users at least “claimed” their Threads account.
Ah. The Google+ approach to signing up "users".
Yeah all that mess with Google+ and all that came out of it was we lost the + operator in Google Search.
But you can't close your threads account without closing your instagram account.
Added to my circle!
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 :(
ITT: no one who actually went through the sign-up process. It's like a 3 step process. Eventually you get brought to a screen that asks if you want to follow all of your current followers on Instagram. You can choose yes or no to all the people you currently follow, or you can individually select who you want to follow in Threads the people you follow on Instagram. If you select anyone that has not yet activated their Threads account it literally tells you that nothing will happen for now, but if and when the user activates the account, you will follow them if they are public or it will request to follow them if they are private.
There's no magic happening here. There's no shadow accounts...you use the SAME login for Instagram and Threads. They obviously know when you activate your threads account and it will just show the list of users who have already completed the signup and requested to follow you
We were armchair warriors on Reddit. Now, we are armchair warriors on Lemmy. insert spidermen pointing fingers at each other meme here
spidermen
don't see that pluralized everyday, heh
Actually, to Meta's credit here, they do transparently say this when you make an account.
You can send follow requests to all of your Insta friends, and once they activate a Threads profile, they will see any follow requests they may have gotten.
I think something that a lot of the comments are missing here is the fact that threads, Instagram and Facebook all have been migrated from individual accounts to ‘meta’ accounts. I’m certain that we will see this happen with many platforms unless there is a serious shift in data protection laws. I don’t personally think it’s great that it’s the case but that’s just how it is. The meta platform is quite similar to how google migrated YouTube users to google accounts way back in the day. This monolithic structure ensures that they can keep your user data in a more streamlined database. From a sys admin and a business perspective it makes a lot of sense. From a user who doesn’t care and already uses all of those services perspective it makes a lot of sense. From a privacy conscious user perspective it makes no sense. Then again metas platform is in no way for the user who cares how their data is being handled.
I guess another perspective is talking about interoperability. It kind of feels like they are taking the web3 (I know it’s a loaded term) approach but instead of applying it in a way that allows free development and communication in a way that basically pulls from decentralized/distributed databases you instead get a centralized monolithic model that creates interoperability within their own walled garden.
Dude there are people with the name poo poo pee pee on Facebook. I regret ever using my real name with Google and Facebook
Meanwhile, I got my first ever Facebook ban because someone salty about losing an argument reported me for using a fake name. I was using my real name, which has a Scandinavian letter in it, and had to submit a picture of my fucking passport for fb to unlock my account 🤦
I do find it weird how so many people for both claimed their accounts were suspended or banned for not using a real name, when I never gave them my real name and have kept both of those accounts the entire time without issue. Maybe it's because I don't actually use Facebook; but I still use a lot of Google's shit because there isn't anything better yet.
I had my fake account deactivated for using a made up name a few years ago. I was forced to giving it a real fake name instead of a comedy one. Haven't used it years now so I don't even know if it's still working.
Then again metas platform is in no way for the user who cares how their data is being handled.
This is very important. Users choose to give their data over to these companies.
They should have that choice, regardless of the repercussions.
Why would anyone be surprised by this? Zuckerberg would have to be a complete idiot to not use Instagram's existing social graph for Threads.
What I'm surprised about is that he didn't use Facebook.
If you look carefully at Meta's actions in the last few years, you'll notice they're slowly stepping away from the Facebook brand and product. I suspect that they no longer internally consider Facebook to be their main product, giving way for Instagram, which at the moment is a lot more popular and despite the obvious association doesn't have a tainted name the same way Facebook does.
Same here. I reread it because I thought I missed the word "Facebook".
They did say "X milions of accounts were ACTIVATED in one day", not "created".
That number actually seems pretty low now, considering the number of Instagram accounts is already in the billions. Maybe they didn't activate all of them to make it seem more believable?
Yeah but the didn't launch on the EU yet.
Thanks for the reminder to delete my Instagram account. Though I've never posted anything there, I've used it to follow some people.
Is it too much to hope that all of Meta crashes and burns? It's infuriating seeing Meta, and corporations like them, harvest all of our information...
What I can't figure is... who sits down and thinks "fuck Elon Musk and Twitter, I'm sick of this bullshit" and then follows that logic with "you know what I need more of in my life? Fuckin' FACEBOOK, yeah."
I think novelty is an unfortunately large part of this. I day unfortunately because I think it’s very lame that we find creating accounts on servers providing the same service as another service we already an account on … interesting.
“We were promised flying cars and instead got 160 characters”. Well now we’ve got 160 characters … twice?!
Meaningless superficial cheap FOMO weaponised as advertising fodder. Shameful really.
Yes it does feel like swapping a ticket for the Titanic with a ticket for the Lusitania.
So far Threads has been blocked in the EU because of data privacy concerns. If they don't show that their code is keeping data stored safely and in the EU it will continue being flagged in all appstores.
Can we please stop with the misinformation campaign.
Everyone on here is trying to pat each other on the back by being better than Reddit.
So far no one on here acts differently from Reddit, no matter how much you guys like to pretend lol.
“Shadow accounts” lol. It’s literally your instagram account. Threads is built on top of Instagram. None of this is some hidden secret.
Sir, this is Lemmy.
I'd you have to create a threads account, which shares and logins to your Instagram account, for it to be active, but people are being sent advice to follow accounts which haven't been activated, then this is bad faith behaviour and not misinformation.
And now Meta knows when she's having her period, the phone number of her gynecologist, and what period products she buys... thanks to the app spying on her health and fitness, contact, and shopping data.
#WTF
Just deleted my Instagram account. I really want go delete Facebook and remove all things Meta from my life.
i did the reverse. deleted my facebook years ago but holding onto my instagram for now. i hardly use it anymore but it’s nice to keep in contact with old friends, but i’m on the fringe of deleting it
It'd be a luxury for me to delete insta but as a cartoonist that'd be just shooting myself in the foot. That said. I don't have a FB anymore and only content post to both IG and Reddit these days. I do all my hangin' here now :)
If anyone was bothering to listen, we've discovered that big tech uses a lot of fraud to make themselves look bigger than they are, especially early on
Sounds like Google+ all over again...
It basically is, haha.
Let's look at history repeat itself
For what I've heard they reserve existing Instagram usernames so no one can register with your Instagram username, so it's not as bad at it might sound
Thats the positive side, but im 99% sure that isnt why they did it.
You mean to say... They are preemptively manipulating people?? Noooo!
You cannot register a new username on Threads only. Threads username = Instagram username. If the username is already taken on Instagram, then it is also not available on Threads.
This feature can be achieved very easily by them without making accounts. They already have a list of Instagram usenames. When a new user makes an account on Threads, check the username against a simple list of Instagram usernames and if it matches, throw an error stating the username is not available.
Why does that person need to have an actual account on Threads?
Why does that person need to have an actual account on Threads?
They don’t. They just use their existing Instagram account.
Does anyone remember Google+? When they tried to make everyone with a YouTube account also have a Google+ account.
Spoiler alert: it didn't go well
Which is a pity because the ideas of having "circles" was actually clever. Or at least I thought so back then. I wonder how modern social media would look like if they all implemented that.
Sadly, it was destined to fail. In Diaspora and in Google+.
The thing is, while people definitely do have different circles, they don't like to think about these circles in an explicit way.
Facebook has had something like this for a while now, you can set visibility settings on every post, but again almost nobody uses it.
Will "deleting" my Instagram account make a difference at all?
your treads account is apart of your instragram account. You can't delete one and not the other. Meta said they already working away to delete just one
Interesting. Weren't they working on a way to have a unified login for FB, IG, and Whatsapp at some point?
I delete the IG app periodically anyways (it's a time suck). Haven't put it back since Threads went live so not even sure what things are looking like anymore. I'm too old for this lol
I think it would then delete any account in both Instagram and Threads.
But there's no need to do that. If you already have Instagram and your happy with it, there's nothing extra you need to worry about just because there's a shadow account pre set up for you in Threads.
It's a shady way for them to push their new service, but it's not like they suddenly have any more info on you than they already had.
Eh, I already have a love/hate relationship with IG. If I cared more about internet privacy, I wouldn't have a smart phone or any online accounts.
I only use instagram 1 day per year, it’s usually in July. Today was that day for using instantghram and I uploaded 4 vacation photos. My iPhone battery dropped like a rock afterwards and even plugged into a 2.1 amp tablet charger and it could barely make headway recharging my phone. I may cut loose my threads, now.
In fairness, it's pretty smart, IMHO: one of the big difficulties in getting a social site started is getting a critical mass of people together to sustain conversation. Facebook already has plenty of Instagram users, so giving them all access to Threads seems like a pretty good way to bootstrap Threads.
It’s literally the same account you already have.
Is this not basically what google and Microsoft do with their stuff, minus the subscribe even though they aren't there yet bit? It's your meta account, regardless if you're using that particular feature?
Threads isn't "successful", they just happen to own the social graph. Why can't people see this?
So it's made of mostly fake accounts from Instagram. That has to be the shadiest thing I've seen from a social media app. Just making "shadow" accounts from other social media apps to artificially boost it's analytics.
I especially noticed this as someone that lives in the EU and decided to check it out using a VPN. 90% of my friends are also from inside the EU and can't download the app but they were all in my list of suggested people.
Yet another example of meta being extra fucking creepy
In other news, Facebook Messenger somehow knows I have a Facebook account!
Copy, paste, succes
They already advertised this in a way though.
I think one of the links for IG is Threads.instagram.con
That alone made me think they’re going to end up finding a way to merge the two or make them paired.
Is this a reported news, or a speculation? Really curious, before I start going around, repeating it.
Been seeing that a lot around here. Pics or it didn't happen.
People are all too eager to believe stuff if it feeds into their preconceived ideas about these companies.
it's true that they have shadow accounts for Instagram accounts cause threads is currently operating under Instagram, I don't know if that's factored into their 30 million user count tho
When you follow one of the shadow accounts it says something like "they'll respond when they join threads" or something
It's true. As people who I follow on Instagram have started to sign up for Threads it has notified me that we're following each other. There's an option when you sign up to allow it to do that. And if you set up a private account, then you still have to approve people who follow you. But this way, you don't have to worry about remembering to check if someone has signed up yet after you sign up.
I have two Instagram accounts and I created a Threads account on one. Searched for the other and there’s nothing I can find for it. Definitely can’t follow the second account on Threads.
I’m not trying to be a Meta apologist here. I trust them about as far as I can throw a car (especially given the insane amount of data collection mentioned in the App/Play Stores) but in my limited test I don’t see a way to follow an account until you activate it on Threads
As horrible as this obviously is, it's also quite clever.
Very clever!
i knew accounts were being automatically created and thats why i don't believe the numbers
Accounts are not automatically being created.
big numbers for ego boosting headlines and ad sales
They did this with Facebook accounts to instagram too. My brother has never downloaded instagram yet he's my top follow suggestion all the time and it just uses his Facebook profile picture automatically
Well, it's basically an extension to your insta account. So I imagine when you sign up, it sends requests to others you know to make it seem like everybody uses it.
It’s funny how people continue to think that joining threads is optional.
I have only an Instagram account, checked just now with a friend who has instagram, Facebook, and now threads. He cannot find me on threads at all, so either this isn't done to EVERYONE on Instagram, or these are just baseless rumors being spread around.
yuck!
I don't see anybody posting there after the first day, save for brand and meme pages
So they peer pressure Insta users to use Threads?
I assumed this was the case and that any reporting on "users" and the "historical" nature of their short time to 10M users was 100% BS.
I think the strategy is great and I would do the same that they are doing, except I'd leave out the bit where I crowed about reaching 10M users in 7 hour or 100M in a few days. It's too obviously a lie supported by the ability to leverage one network into another.
I don't see anything wrong with this
This happened to me. Joined threads and what do I see? Signal and instantly had a bunch of random accounts follow me.
I think I'm sticking to Mastodon and Pixelfed.
Not being up on (or caring about) what evil Meta is up to I was wondering how they got 90M users overnight, that splains it.
Of course that's why they had so many new accounts so fast! And that's why removing the Threads account also deletes your Instagram one! No way a bad app like that, missing the basic features (front what I've read in reviews), would have so many users so fast!
There's no way an app with 2 billion accounts couldn't have 1 percent of it's users take 30 seconds to sign up for a Twitter alternative they've been waiting for? Why is this such a conspiracy to people?
Because they really like conspiracies. Meta is only the regular level of evil it was before, it's not a new improved variety of evil.
Holy shit that's why they bundled it in with Instagram? So they can inflate the adoption rate?
Add far I remember they did something similar for Facebook/meta/"insert new name here" back then, I remember someone made a lawsuit.
I'm surprised that people think it would be different...
That is just messed up.
Oh no the social network's new app uses the social network from the old app....
What did you expect? Honestly, this doesn't seem nefarious, just a smart way to bootstrap your new product.
Keep in mind, they technically don't even have to use Instagram's internal data to do that, they could have scraped publicly available Instagram / Twitter data to do the same.
They're so gross lol