There are 1 billion active users on Instagram and those users were invited to Threads using an existing account. Celebrities, businesses, streamers, etc. all popped up on Threads within the first few hours of public release.

I'm a big nerd and just learned about the fediverse within recent months. Everyone else I know who uses Twitter and Threads have no clue what Mastodon is.

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, it's unfathomable how huge Instagram is. That's a massive number of people who could be easily informed "hey, wanna try our new product?" As an aside, when I googled it, it said there was 2 billion active Instagram users.

I find it silly when people act skeptical of Threads' numbers, since Meta only needed a tiny number of their existing user base to try it out.

[–] Lockszmith@lemmy.ninja 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There was a time - when facebook/ig didn't exist, the difference was - back then nothing exists, and so the intriguing new thing (that didn't make money yet), was buggy as hell, and so the spread was FAST.

Thankfully, those big projects, whenever they make a mistake, the fediverse gets a boost.

I've been following the fediverse since disapora announced their plans circa 2010. I created an account on one of the instances in 2012 and probably visited it twice since.

It's one thing to be early adopters when something is completely new compared to something that comes to replace something that everybody is already using.

We'll get there. With every mistake these big corps will do, we'll get more and more people in, until THIS will become the 'cool' thing around.

Until then, it will be much much better.

[–] Lightor@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

My worry is once this becomes the "cool thing", then the corpos will come in with dollar signs in their eyes. Yes, I think lemmy will be harder to mess with given its nature, but I never count big corps out when there's money to be made.

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