Instagram

This morning @Google posted its first message to Threads, and a quick look at its Instagram profile reveals the account is customer number 67,461,606. Mark Zuckerberg might chime in again once Threads passes 100 million registered accounts, which shouldn’t take long at the current pace — about 24 hours ago, the number was 30 million.

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram and its Twitter-competitor Threads, has pushed back at criticism from Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk over its algorithmic feed.

After just one day of operation, Instagram’s new social app is already halfway to 100 million accounts. Alex Heath just noted 48 million in this post and a Command Line update sent out today, but the Threads number keeps climbing. (Check the Instagram account of anyone who’s registered, and it will tell you if they were 1st, 50 millionth, or somewhere in between.)

When I went to look at why Mastodon users shouldn’t worry about Meta building on the ActivityPub protocol, I couldn’t — my Mastodon.xyz account had disappeared.

“It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram.” - Elon Musk, @elonmusk (1), (2).

Now that Instagram Threads has rolled out to the public (that doesn’t live in the EU), Instagram leader Adam Mosseri acknowledged many of the features it’s currently missing, like “search, hashtags, a following feed, graph syncing, fedeverse support, messaging maybe…”

For an example of what success looks like on an Instagram scale, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that the goal is to get Threads on a “clear path to 1 billion people” before figuring out monetization.

Meta’s boss made his last update seven hours ago when it was at 10 million, but more than twelve hours after launch, the pace of registrations (which consists of clicking a button three or four times, assuming you already have one of the 2 billion-plus Instagram accounts) for Threads hasn’t slowed down.

Why is Thread’s plan to use the same decentralized protocol (ActivityPub) as Mastodon a “clear victory for our cause,” according to the founder / CEO of Mastodon?

Mark Zuckerberg announced Instagram’s Threads app has over 5 million registered accounts already.

Launching a new social network on the back of one that has over a billion users has its advantages — new user accounts on Threads are already showing registration numbers beyond 2 million just two hours after its launch, which Mark Zuckerberg confirmed with a post.

Mark Zuckerberg logged in to his rarely-used Twitter account to post a quick joke on the day Instagram launched Threads, an app that is trying to be a lot like Twitter.

The leaker who’s uncovered so many features and unmentioned details in apps like Twitter and Instagram, now works for Meta on its new social platform.

Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri agrees with us that posts on Threads are “kind of” tweets, so maybe we can find a middle ground.

If you didn’t already know Instagram’s Threads app is close to launching, perhaps a post from Adam Mosseri will seal the deal.

Adam Mosseri is so sick of Apple’s disappointing assistant that he switched back to Android. But he wouldn’t risk missing out on Instagram’s new platform, Threads, just to use Google Assistant... would he?

You’d be excused for noticing that the name of Meta’s new Twitter competitor is very familiar. It already launched a different clone app tied to Instagram under the same name in 2019.

Responding to Meta blocking news on its platforms there over a new law requiring platform owners to negotiate with and pay news publishers for content, Minister of Canadian Heritage Pablo Rodriguez announced the country will no longer buy ads on Facebook:

The Twitter alternative from Meta appears set to launch on July 6th, but the Irish Independent reports that Ireland’s Data Protection Commission has been in contact with the company about the new product and confirmed the launch won’t extend to the EU “at this point.”

Twitter user Alessandro Paluzzi, a developer who’s been publishing leaks about Meta’s upcoming Twitter clone, tweeted early this morning that the app had been released, but it was taken down sometime later.

The eponymous Bloonface recently shut down their Mastodon instance, with a blog post discussing in detail the current culture clash gripping the decentralized social network as various folks contend with the launch of Instagram Threads, which will eventually interoperate through the ActivityPub protocol.

A new batch of parental supervision features have been created to protect minors on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.

A write-up in The Washington Post says the Zuck’s latest attempt at image rehabilitation (remember the “only eating meat from animals he’d personally killed” phase?) is, in part, a bid to win over Musk stans.

Over the last hour or so, the Facebook page failed to load, attempts to upload Instagram Stories failed with an error message, while some reported they couldn’t send or receive messages on WhatsApp and Messenger, and Downdetector showed spikes for all of Meta’s services.