There’s good and bad for Threads being linked so tightly with Instagram. One of those things is that, you can’t delete your Threads account, without deleting your Instagram account. So you either have both or you have neither. On top of that, you can’t change your handle, on either app, once you’ve signed up. Which is a bit of an oversight.
Currently, the only way to sign up for Threads is to sign in through Instagram. That’s unlikely to change in the future, but who knows. However, the fact that you would need to delete your Instagram account to delete your Threads account is a big deal. This is mentioned in Meta’s Supplemental Privacy Policy, so this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
The Supplemental Privacy Policy mentions that “You may deactivate your Threads profile at any time, but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account.”
Threads is barebones, but getting a ton of attention
Threads has a lot of features missing, like search, trending topics, DMs and much more. But it is getting a whole lot of attention. And this is because people are looking for an alternative to Elon Musk’s Twitter. Which he seems to be intent on running into the ground these days.
On top of that, Instagram already had 2 billion monthly active users (compared to Twitter’s 300 million). So there’s already a lot more users available for Threads. But again, the telling thing here will be whether people stick around.
The team behind Threads is working to launch new features fairly quickly, so we might get some of these requested features pretty soon. Which is going to be the flip side of Threads’ success or failure. If they can deliver what users want, in a timely manner. Remember, when Twitter launched, it was pretty barebones as well.