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?
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.
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.
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.
By automatically signing up Instagram users.
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“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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
How many active user? I’m one of those people who used the app for few minutes before removing it
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!!!
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.
