ITT: no one who actually went through the sign-up process. It’s like a 3 step process. Eventually you get brought to a screen that asks if you want to follow all of your current followers on Instagram. You can choose yes or no to all the people you currently follow, or you can individually select who you want to follow in Threads the people you follow on Instagram. If you select anyone that has not yet activated their Threads account it literally tells you that nothing will happen for now, but if and when the user activates the account, you will follow them if they are public or it will request to follow them if they are private.
There’s no magic happening here. There’s no shadow accounts…you use the SAME login for Instagram and Threads. They obviously know when you activate your threads account and it will just show the list of users who have already completed the signup and requested to follow you
Now I understand, thanks for explaining. I think it’s just the logical thing to do, it’s just the screen when someone registers on threads and doesn’t mean it creates a shadow account, it’d be more complicated actually
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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