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[-] small44@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago

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

[-] Cat@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

@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.

[-] ggadget6@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] small44@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

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

[-] marmar04@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

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

[-] ZILtoid1991@kbin.social 25 points 1 year ago

By automatically signing up Instagram users.

[-] ragrum@kbin.social 27 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Pat@kbin.run 31 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] ragrum@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago

What makes you think the shadow accounts are part of the 100M figure? The Android app alone is already in the 50M+ downloads band.

[-] BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] Itty53@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] atocci@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] lozunn@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

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[-] small44@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

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

[-] VerifiablyMrWonka@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] therealpygon@kbin.social 7 points 1 year 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?

[-] Dio@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

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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[-] Studabakerhawk@kbin.social 6 points 1 year 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.

[-] Swyperider@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago

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

[-] PabloDiscobar@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They cannot leave threads. The only way to leave threads is to nuke your instagram account.

[-] magic_lobster_party@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Might just become another Google Plus situation.

[-] PabloDiscobar@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] merlin@open-source.social 2 points 1 year ago

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?

[-] ImaginaryFox@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] merlin@open-source.social 2 points 1 year 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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[-] gzrrt@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago

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

[-] Chariotwheel@kbin.social 4 points 1 year 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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[-] merlin@open-source.social 7 points 1 year ago

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

[-] ReCursing@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

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

[-] PabloDiscobar@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Add it to the pile of the brexit benefits. Your sovereignty to use threads is intact.

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[-] manwe@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

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

[-] peter@feddit.uk 9 points 1 year ago

I'm not a fan of the way the feed is basically 99% accounts I don't follow

[-] manwe@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

this is exactly the issue I had. I started muting accounts for about 30 minutes and then just gave up

[-] xc2215x@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

It seems like an Instagram with less users mostly.

[-] skellener@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago
[-] nimbool@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Disappointing but not surprising.

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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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