So I caved. Thursday night, after seeing basically everyone I follow on Twitter post a screenshot of the same green icon, I downloaded Threads. Took about ninety seconds to set up because it just yanks your whole Instagram profile over: same handle, same bio, same follower list if you want it. Zuckerberg tweeted (posted? threaded?) on Thursday morning that they'd hit 30 million signups already, which is an absurd number for one day, and I believe it, because for about eighteen hours straight my feed was nothing but people I haven't talked to since 2016 saying "ok trying this out."
My actual first impression: it's fine. It's Twitter with the edges sanded off. No quote-tweets yet, no DMs, no hashtags, no way to see trending topics, and the algorithm feed is doing a lot of showing-me-people-I-dont-follow which I could do without. It genuinely does feel calmer than Twitter right now, but I think that's mostly because there are no bots yet and nobody's figured out how to be horrible on it. Give it three weeks.
Here's the part that actually annoyed me enough to write about it, though. I wanted to see what deleting the thing looked like — not because I was quitting, just out of curiosity, the same way I poke at a settings menu to see what's in there. Turns out you can't delete a Threads profile on its own. The only option is "deactivate," and if you want it gone-gone, the app tells you flat out that you have to delete your entire Instagram account to do it. Not deactivate Instagram. Delete it. Photos, DMs, years of posts, all of it, just to get rid of your Threads presence.
That's not a bug, obviously, it's the whole point. They built it directly into the Instagram graph on purpose so that leaving has a cost attached. I get why, from a growth-numbers standpoint it's smart, but as a user it's the kind of thing that makes me trust a product less, not more. It's the software equivalent of a gym contract with no cancellation clause. Twitter has plenty of problems (more on that in a second) but at least deleting your Twitter account doesn't also delete your other unrelated accounts.
Speaking of Twitter: the timing here is not an accident. Elon spent the July 4th weekend rate-limiting how many tweets people could even read per day, supposedly to fight data scraping, and it turned the app into a broken mess for a few days where you'd hit a wall mid-scroll and get a "rate limit exceeded" message like you were hitting some sketchy API. People were furious, and Threads landed exactly five days later into a userbase that was already primed to bolt. Whether that's genius product timing or just Meta noticing an opening and moving fast, I don't know, probably both. I also saw that Twitter's lawyers sent Meta some kind of letter this week accusing them of poaching ex-Twitter engineers to build Threads and misusing trade secrets. No lawsuit filed as of me typing this, just a threat. I'd put money on nothing coming of it, legally, but it's a very petty and very on-brand move regardless.
I'm keeping my Threads account, at least for now, mostly to see what it turns into once the honeymoon wears off. But the delete-your-whole-Instagram thing is going to nag at me. I've had this blog since 2011 and I still have every post from year one sitting here because nobody made me choose between keeping my old writing and using a new platform. Feels like a small thing to ask.
Also, unrelated, but the heat this week has been genuinely brutal where I am, and I've seen a few headlines saying this might be the hottest week the planet's recorded in however-many-thousand years they can measure that sort of thing. Not a tech story I guess, but it's hard to type at a laptop for six hours when your apartment is 85 degrees and the fan is just moving hot air around. Going to go find some ice.