It’s been out for less than ten days and it already has more than 35x the number of total users as Mastodon. It might not be for us, but saying that no one would want to use it is just sour grapes.
I've pretty quickly concluded that sour grapes are in no short supply here.
That so many people genuinely cannot fathom the concept that many people actually like social media - and may even be aware of the privacy cost and find it acceptable - really speaks more about how out-of-touch a lot of people here are than anything else.
The numbers are highly skewed because of the launch. A number of users are being paid to create content during the launch. A lot of the users are just checking out the hype. Some will stay, many won't.
The numbers won't really be useful or comparable until the dust settles. I give it a month.
Why shouldn't it? They are interested in personal data, not some fabricated online personalities.
Let it be the perfect counterargument to every moron who says "I'm not that important". Yes, you are. If you weren't, the Big Tech wouldn't go to such length to acquire all the data about you, they can put their sweaty palms on.
Which has to mean that they're blocking everyone from accessing Threads via VPN, since they can't tell where the real source is beyond the VPN exit server.
Authoritarian regimes like China do this, too, unsuccessfully.
Meta has exposure to enough of the internet that I'm sure they can identify VPNs relatively accurately. If you see activity coming from a single IP associated with users that you know to be located all over the world, you can draw conclusions pretty fast.
I find this very hilarious after seeing so many people make threads accs and posting them to their stories on insta when you can't even use the app. And I kept thinking about the mountaons of data their collecting.
It wasn't even launched in the entirety of EU and the Republic of Ireland at all, because of GDPR concerns, but then, the Digital Markets Act also chimed in.