By automatically signing up Instagram users.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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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.
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?
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.
What makes you think the shadow accounts are part of the 100M figure? The Android app alone is already in the 50M+ downloads band.
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.
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.
That’s not true. You still have to manually add your Instagram account to Threads. These are genuine signups. It’s been all over the news as the fastest growing app of all time.
"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?
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!!!!!
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.
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.
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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