Threads surpasses 100M users
theverge.com
theverge.com
It is not a new social it is an extension of an existing network.
I'm not saying this to be edgy, but stating a fact that merits recognition. Facebook started by replicating student networks in Cambridge. Then it was slowly introduced in specific companies like Apple and so on, and then the US as a whole, and only then the rest of the world, country by country.
You always need this focus on a specific existing network, in order to reduce friction of transition/extension. It doesn't make the end result any less valid. Because if you can extend Instagram with a Twitter-like app. Well. You have a Twitter-like network now. You did it.
By this I mean that the choice between threads being its own app and being a separate tab inside the instagram app was techical/political.
Just the fact that you cannot delete your threads account without destroying your instagram account!
They are a single network usable in two apps.
To me the headline is similar to "The new instagram web interface has 100M users" which would actually sound more surprising
This is why Meta didn't do Threads in all the years it could, while Twitter was around. Because Instagram users wanted Instagram, and they had it, they didn't want Twitter.
But now with Twitter in a downward spiral, we have Twitter users looking for alternatives. That is a separate force at play. And now consider that a subset of Instagram users are also Twitter users. This subset, I believe, represents a good chunk of those 100 million users that downloaded the app and signed in.
And because Twitter sucks now and with uncontrollable debt, legacy code and mismanagement will suck more and more over time, this force of users trying to move somewhere will stick around.
This is why Meta is moving into this space now.
As for it being a single network in two apps, sure. For now. This is just the bootstrap process. Some Threads users will be new to Instagram, they'd have signed up for Instagram to use Threads. I'd be one of those. So we'll see how things develop.
As for the marketing clarity of making it a separate app, instead of a tab in Instagram, sure. But this is about narratives, about stories. The story is "here's this Twitter clone". Most Instagram users won't care and you don't want to disturb them by changing the Instagram app. That'd be bad for them, bad for business. But leveraging the authentication and network in a separate app fashioned after Twitter is a pretty smart move for the overlap of people who DO want Twitter and have Instagram.
In time, the apps may merge. But this will only happen if Meta has evidence that the overlap between the two groups is large enough so that merging the apps won't be disruptive to too many users.
In that case "New app gains 100M users in a week" would be a pretty biased way to phrase "10% of the userbase tries out new layout"
You also don't automatically bring over your followers.
These two factors make this very different from simply adding a feature to IG. The only thing they leverage from IG is the auth.
Also a lot of the tech, policy, journalism, etc communities just completely pulled up stakes and migrated. It's a frenzy.
Once Threads opens up to the fediverse, blocking threads.net is going to cause friction with the largest Mastodon instances.
Mastodon.social already has signed an NDA backing support of Threads and anyone that had a following on Mastodon who has an even bigger following on Threads, is likely not going to use Mastodon (or at least the smaller instances) as much.
Stephen Fry, George Takei, Kathy Griffin and Professor Brian Cox were all on Mastodon and now have an bigger following on Threads.