Absolutely appalling. It’s a clear anti-consumer trick to lock you into Meta’s ecosystem. There’s no benefit to the end user at all. It’s just boosting Meta’s numbers so they can sell ad space for more money.
If an existing Instagram user signs up for Threads to try it out, and they decide they don’t like it, they’re stuck with the account forever anyway.
If a new user wants to try Threads, they have to sign up for Instagram too. That way, if Threads doesn’t take off, all those new users at least have Instagram accounts they might use instead.
With Facebook and Instagram, Meta has clearly shown that they’re entirely capable of making separate accounts and linking them together. They could have copied that same model with Threads. It took them more design work to make a worse user experience.
Who has an Instagram account, already has a thread account already. It’s the same account. You can delete info on it, but of course deleting one of them will delete both, because it’s only one.
It’s like saying “deleting my OneDrive account will delete my Microsoft account too, is so unfair”
Poor analogy. I can deprovision OneDrive (or any other M365 app) for any user while keeping all their other services intact. Meta obviously doesn’t want that scenario.
From the very beginning they were going to make it easy to join. The sinister part is always when you try to leave. If you don’t play by their rules they will take back everything and leave you high and dry. The ActivityPub support was never going to be a two way street. It’s likely a means to siphon fediverse content and drag users back into Meta’s data harvesting.
Or they’ll delete your entire art account you’ve been using for over a decade because one user reported you aren’t you. Insta killed my account for “violating guidelines” and impersonating myself apparently. At least I don’t have to deal with Threads now, but R.I.P. my creative drive since then.
This is the biggest risk of centralized platforms in my opinion, it’s too easy to get mysteriously banned and lose access to years worth of content with no recourse. Good luck getting a human customer service agent who is actually equipped to help you.
Yeah, they’re too big to help anyone that isn’t a top earner for them. I’d like to self host a Lemmy instance for art but, my ISP sucks and I’m running low on motivation these days.
Good neeeeeeeeeews everyone! It’s a 2-for-1. Meh, if Meta wants to make it easier for you to quit Meta, then so be it. I unfortunately deleted my instagram account a while back and will not be able to benefit from this deal.
As I commented in another thread. From the article: Meta’s supplemental privacy policy states, “You may deactivate your Threads profile at any time, but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account.”
I interpret it as that you can’t delete your Threads profile, unless you delete your Instagram account. So it’s not as if you try to delete your Threads account and oopsie your Insta is gone as well… same, but still different.
I won’t be at all surprised if Threads is not much more than a skin over the instagram backend, which would lead to these kind of outcomes. Folks like the think of a sinister reason, but I reckon a technical one is more likely.
The issue is that large tech companies rarely restrain themselves when there’s a big pile of money to be made. The odds are high that Meta will exploit this whether it was an accident or not.
As those two things are at totally different places in their product lifecycles and will likely have entirelly different uptakes, possibly different populations and quite different usage patterns (something technically extremelly important in high-performance settings because of caching), in terms of Software Architecture it doesn’t make sense to have one on top of the other.
The only thing that makes sense from the point of view of software systems design is Single Sign-On (i.e. linking accounts).
So either their head techies are not really all that senior (frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised, as judging by their library design and completelly messy product lifecycles, even Google seems to have few or no genuine Technical Architects) or the decision has nothing to do with technology.
So there’s finally a way to actually delete instagram accounts? The number of times I went through the whole process just to find my account not deleted is ridiculous.
My Instagram account won't let me follow anybody for some reason (cites protection of users or somesuch). I never use it anyway. I've requested a data download and will delete it imminently, as it is completely useless to me.
May as well avoid them accidentally creating me a Threads account I don't want.
I too used to be bogged down with one handle everywhere I went. but then I saw the light. I saw the truth. look at my username; it is gibberish! does that stop me? no, it only gives me power! my strength lies in the words I post, not the name under which they are posted. I might delete this account and make a new one under the first thing that pops into my head... in doing so I would lose nothing, and gain the world.
free yourself from your prison. creativity is liberty.
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