Meta briefly made Threads available on the web before pulling profiles offline a few hours later. The Verge was able to access Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s first thread (is that what we call them?!) using the web app, and many other brands and creators including Netflix, Gary Vee, and Instagram.
The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, already has nearly 2,500 followers, and Zuckerberg has less than 2,000, so it’s safe to say that early Threads access has only been provided to a few thousand testers so far. Alessandro Paluzzi has discovered some of the brands and creators that got early access.
It will be interesting to see if they actually enable our ability to follow thread accounts on mastodon.
but man… that laundry list of data they want to access.
Yeah, I’m cautiously optimistic that if they do truly join the fediverse, we’ll finally have our real twitter replacement (aka relatively community friendly tech that’s accessible to people who don’t want to hear the word instance, AND the big benefit that basically everybody already has an instagram account). I haven’t used twitter since the musk takeover, but a lot of people whose opinions and reporting I care about still do. Most of them never bothered with the migration to mastodon, although lots of them are on bluesky. I’m hoping that the easy of availability of Threads gets them over there, and that the fediverse connection doesn’t take too long so I can start to interact with them via Mastodon without having to agree to all those permissions. Sorry, kinda lost the plot there.
I think the real concern should be that they’ll make it really easy to get on board with, until almost nobody is creating accounts directly with federated instances. Once they have enough penetration, they’ll defederate and force people to choose; them or the Fediverse.
it’s called Embrace-Extend-Extinguish and yes, that’s what people are concerned about.