Threads, the rival of Twitter with the stamp of Instagram, is now available to everyone. Well, for everyone except for European citizens, since the app will be available later (although there is a trick to download it now). In the first hours, since the app is available, already has about 10 million usersand with the margin of a billion potential Instagram users.
However, that strength, that of having Instagram as a gateway, also brings with it a huge problem. Users who have registered in Threads using their meta social network credentials (you can also register from the browser) they are in for an unfortunate surprise.
It turns out that, once both profiles are linked and your Threads account is registered using Instagram, both applications are linked forever. No problem in this regard, since you buy the mother company behind and even some other functionality. The main problem is that if at any point you feel that Thrads is not for you, you will not be able to delete your account.
Or at least you won’t be able to do it without also deleting your Instagram account. Currently, the application does not allow you to delete your Threads account if you have used your Instagram account to sign up, and when you want to deactivate the text network, it necessarily asks you to delete Instagram as well:
You cannot delete Threads without also deleting your Instagram account
This is standard practice for many of Meta’s “add-on” apps to their main social networks. It is exactly the same thing that happens with Facebook and Messenger: you cannot delete your account in the messaging service without also deleting your Facebook profile.
As Thread’s options are today, the only thing that Meta’s new social network allows is the possibility of “deactivating” the profile if you don’t want to use it anymore and want to keep your Instagram account. At the moment, yes, Threads allows you to delete individual posts, but not the entire account.
If you are someone who is concerned about your privacy, it is an important issue that, sooner or later, Meta will have to solve. It is not that Threads is some subsidiary application of Instagram, since in the future it will also implement the ActivityPub protocol like Mastodon, that is, it will work as a separate service, at least in the eyes of users, but always linked to your Instagram account.