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.
If that were the case though, wouldn’t the number of Threads users be the exact same as the current number of Instagram users?
No because they’re only doing this for Instagram users who are located in the United States. It hasn’t launched anywhere else yet.
Probably because it will be quite illegal in Europe so they probably are not going to do it for European users but it hasn’t launched there yet anyway so we don’t know.
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.
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
Yeah, I signed up for it, they have an option for you to pre-follow people for when they sign up to threads
Does that person who has been pre-followed then get a notification to join and respond/follow back?
Because that would be a great way to boost the new service exponentially.
Yes they do
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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.
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 :(
It isn’t very easy to get hold of for the “uninitiated”. Which is partially a good thing, in my opinion. Meaningful interactions require effort.
Barriers to entry improve the quality of participants.
Setting things up on fediverse is overly complicated and could be made easier.
The biggest problem is it really isn’t all that clear what the pros and cons are various instances are, and the truth is that for the most part with the exception of a few particular instances it really doesn’t matter.
What might make the most sense is to have a website people can sign up on and then it just registers their account on one of a few instances to spread the load. Obviously that list I would have to be curated so it didn’t include obvious problematic instances,but it wouldn’t be that hard to do that. And that would make it as easy as threads is which basically is just an instance when all said and done.
Something that would make it massively easier is portable/decentralised identities, or at least easy account migration. This should go for communities as well so that a community can exist independently of an instance, or be migrated to another instance with subscribers being redirected seamlessly.
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Hey, don’t give them any ideas!
I’ve never had a Facebook or Instagram account in my life. But I do use WhatsApp because it’s the main way most friends and family communicate (Australia).
I would not be happy if I found out I suddenly had a Threads account that my friends could follow without me even signing up, just because I use WhatsApp!
Meta has 100% already made shadow accounts for you across their ecosystem.
They’ve been doing that for just Facebook for at least a decade at this point, with the primary intent of tracking online activity of literally as many people as they can. Much of it is done in an “anonymous” fashion - tied to device MACs, IMEIs, source IP, etc, along with cookies that they’ve persuaded most SaaS companies to integrate on their sites (and often apps), instead of tying it directly to your PII.
Yes, but in this instance, they are allowing people to pre-follow that shadow account and then apparently you get a notification to say they have followed you promoting you to join and follow them back.
That’s a very cunning way to boost their new service quickly!
I’m relieved they’re not doing that with WhatsApp.
You keep saying the word shadow account like it’s some nefarious thing. They are following an existing Instagram account that they already follow, and will get a notification when that existing account starts using a new service.
There is nothing wrong with this.
Yeah, all fair points. And I agree that letting early adopters concretely engage with/follow shadow accounts that “don’t exist yet” is very fucking cheeky and, imo, more than a bit disingenuous.
I think you have nailed the reason they have not done this.
I guarantee you that’s not the reason. They did/do similar shit with Facebook and people were pissed, now anyone barely remembers or cares. People don’t care and facwbook/meta/zuck certainly doesn’t.
Things are more complicated than that. Spinning off of facebook was necessary. Just because you’ve done something once doesn’t mean you do the same thing in similar-but-not-identical situations though. It’s all calculation at the end of the day, and each equation has its own set of variables.
Similar to how we’re likely going to see a brand new form of attack, where instead of being EEE’d, he just tries to smother awareness of us and keep us small. Since he can’t actually outright eliminate us.
And because WhatsApp isn’t popular throughout since there are also regions that almost exclusively use LINE or very heavily adopted Telegram. Not everyone uses Instagram but it’s a popular choice for the kind of service it offers all over the world.
Get friends and family to switch to Signal App
Yeah, that’s not likely sadly.
The fact that WhatsApp is so crucial may very well be the reason. In India and places in Europe, WhatsApp is literally a direct replacement of texting, which means it contains communications from practically everyone and everything - your workplace, your local government, your grocery store, your gym, your friends and family, public services, etc. And since your chats themselves are E2E encrypted, the background usage data Meta can extract from users will be too dirty and unmonetizable.
Their interactions on Facebook and Instagram - now that’s rich data. They get to know exactly where and with which people your preferences and interests lie.
They would never greenlight something based on popularity outside the US, that’s just not how Usians think. WhatsApp might as well not be popular anywhere.
WhatsApp is a messenger. Facebook, Instagram and Threads are social media. Also, Threads is actually by Instagram moreso than it is by Meta (although the distinction isn’t too dramatic, it’s just under the Instagram branding)
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There might be things Meta isn’t allowed to do with WhatsApp. Also the concept of account is bit blurry on WhatsApp because you basically login with your phone number and an SMS code sent to your device. This wouldn’t work as well for a service that can be used elsewhere.
I wanna leave whatsapp so bad but I’m trapped :(
at least you get to use whatsapp. i happen to be bound to the only two countries on the damn planet that near exclusively use facebook messenger for everything including corporate business support. i’d take whatsapp over facebook messenger any day.
of course, i’d take neither given the choice. but still.
What two countries are those so I can avoid them?
Same here. I installed signal but only managed to convince 2 people to use it so far. Everyone else is on WhatsApp
Threads isn’t even in europe yet thanks to EU privacy rules.
Is WhatsApp really that popular???
Yes, especially in India. It’s not a surprise that India is Whatsapp’s biggest market.
5 billion downloads on the Play store. Apparently about 1-2 billion of those are not very active. Still huge numbers though.
Yes, in very poor countries, they subsidize the data usage for WhatsApp, so that it’s free to end users. It’s extraordinarily popular in Asia and Africa as a result.
I already have enough spam and scam messages on Whatsapp now imagine they are opening my profile to another billions of people
Now we know why it was not launched in EU.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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?
Thats the positive side, but im 99% sure that isnt why they did 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 other news, Facebook Messenger somehow knows I have a Facebook account!
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?
I smell an antitrust lawsuit coming up. Whether we hate Twitter or not, they could have a valid case against Meta here as this shit is anti-competitive as fuck. If Elon is smart enough, and that’s a big if, he could seize the opportunity to sue Meta over this and win. To just be able to recycle existing Instagram users gives Meta an unfair advantage over existing microblogging social media platforms.
Using an advantage does not mean it’s anti competitive.
It is anti-competitive because it is like Windows forcing Internet Explorer as a default, which the EU for instance ruled anti-competitive in the past.
But they aren’t forcing Threads as a default. They are associating Instagram accounts to Threads accounts, the same way Google associates GMail accounts to GDrive.
We all hate Facebook, but can we hate them for the things that they actually do, instead of inventing false reasons to hate them?
Good point, the GMail and GDrive analogy is indeed more accurate. Though I don’t believe Google is a good example as it is actually the subject of many antitrust lawsuits.
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There’s no planet where a viable antitrust case exists. That is pure unbridled delusion.
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.
