softpboy,

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

Junkers_Klunker,

Thats the positive side, but im 99% sure that isnt why they did it.

zuhayr,
@zuhayr@lemmy.world avatar

You mean to say… They are preemptively manipulating people?? Noooo!

Meruten,

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?

sauerkraus,

Why does that person need to have an actual account on Threads?

They don’t. They just use their existing Instagram account.

ihsan,
@ihsan@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

You cannot register a new username on Threads only. Threads username = Instagram username. If the username is already taken on Instagram, then it is also not available on Threads.

spiderman,
@spiderman@lemmy.fmhy.ml avatar

they can be sued for this right?

Holyhandgrenade, (edited )

Sure, and then they’ll be fined for what looks like a huge amount of money to us regular folks but to a corporation like Meta is essentially a slap on the wrist, and they’ll keep doing illegal shit.
We really need to start charging corporations GDP of Switzerland-level sums if we want them to behave ethically.

refurbishedrefurbisher,

Nah, the fine needs to be equal to what their revenue was from having that illegal thing to begin with.

JunctionSystem,

Cat: Not equal, triple. Need to make it HURT.

Aqarius,

I mean, if the US is serious about the whole “corporate personhood” thing, surely that makes corporations eligible for the death penalty?

refurbishedrefurbisher,

You’re assuming the Supreme Court has legitimacy and principles. About that…

zuhayr,
@zuhayr@lemmy.world avatar
damnYouSun,

The rule of GDPR is €10,000 or 5% of annual gross earnings (not net) per incident, whichever is greater.

Even the likes of Meta don’t want to deal with that kind of fine hence why Threads has not been released in the EU.

So it is totally achievable, the problem is the US government don’t actually want to fix the problem because of lobbying.

Zanderlus,

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…

spiderkle,
@spiderkle@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

Supervisor194,
@Supervisor194@lemmy.world avatar

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.”

maegul,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

maegul,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Nice little webcomic that captures the sentiment: mastodon.social/…/110679764036454402

pinkdrunkenelephants,

They might not be real supporters. They are probably shill accounts forum sliding and doing the same things to control consensus they have done everywhere else.

Supervisor194,
@Supervisor194@lemmy.world avatar

This is so true. I wish there was a will/way to eliminate bots altogether on a platform. The more popular a platform is, the more bots swarm in to sway the opinions of the crowd - political opinions, consumer opinions, you name it. Reddit was lousy with bots. Constant ceaseless opinion farming. What’s to stop Lemmy from becoming just as obnoxious?

mobyduck648,
@mobyduck648@lemmy.world avatar

Yes it does feel like swapping a ticket for the Titanic with a ticket for the Lusitania.

gapbetweenus,

Now we know why it was not launched in EU.

notavote,

They did say “X milions of accounts were ACTIVATED in one day”, not “created”.

AeonFelis,

That number actually seems pretty low now, considering the number of Instagram accounts is already in the billions. Maybe they didn’t activate all of them to make it seem more believable?

dani6h,

Yeah but the didn’t launch on the EU yet.

arrgh,

yuck!

Antaeus,

That is just messed up.

masterspace,

Oh no the social network’s new app uses the social network from the old app…

What did you expect? Honestly, this doesn’t seem nefarious, just a smart way to bootstrap your new product.

Keep in mind, they technically don’t even have to use Instagram’s internal data to do that, they could have scraped publicly available Instagram / Twitter data to do the same.

Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever,

Yeah. Even people HERE (who are totally computer experts because they use the internet and sign up for betas…) complain about how “confusing” it is to make an account for mastodon.

This handles that for you. Have an instagram account? your threads is just an opt-in to activate.

Kefass,

Copy, paste, succes

TheDonkerZ,
@TheDonkerZ@lemmy.ca avatar

Actually, to Meta’s credit here, they do transparently say this when you make an account.

You can send follow requests to all of your Insta friends, and once they activate a Threads profile, they will see any follow requests they may have gotten.

sauerkraus,

It’s literally the same account you already have.

Dohnakun,

So they peer pressure Insta users to use Threads?

m3t00,
@m3t00@lemmy.world avatar

big numbers for ego boosting headlines and ad sales

airportline,
@airportline@lemmy.ml avatar

Why would anyone be surprised by this? Zuckerberg would have to be a complete idiot to not use Instagram’s existing social graph for Threads.

Anticorp,

What I’m surprised about is that he didn’t use Facebook.

stevecamb,
@stevecamb@lemmy.world avatar

I wondered if it might be something to do with the real name policy on Facebook. Instagram is closer to Twitter in not having such a policy.

TrueStoryBob,

That was my first thought as well. Facebook is simply too different to Twitter in ways that Instagram is actually similar. On Facebook you’re blogging your life for others to follow. On Instagram and Twitter people are blogging a little of their own, but most users are there to follow others (usually big names or important people) and to comment on events those larger names are blogging about.

AletheCrow,
@AletheCrow@lemmy.world avatar

They already advertised this in a way though.

I think one of the links for IG is Threads.instagram.con

That alone made me think they’re going to end up finding a way to merge the two or make them paired.

Ziggyred,
@Ziggyred@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

So it’s made of mostly fake accounts from Instagram. That has to be the shadiest thing I’ve seen from a social media app. Just making “shadow” accounts from other social media apps to artificially boost it’s analytics.

Gerp,

I especially noticed this as someone that lives in the EU and decided to check it out using a VPN. 90% of my friends are also from inside the EU and can’t download the app but they were all in my list of suggested people.

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