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.

[–] fer0n@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[–] Goldmaster@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] Noughmad@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] UESPA_Sputnik@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Noughmad@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.