People may check out Threads and reject it. Sure. This is why Meta didn't do Threads in all the years it could, while Twitter was around. Because Instagram use

People may check out Threads and reject it. Sure. This is why Meta didn't do Threads in all the years it could, while Twitter was around. Because Instagram users wanted Instagram, and they had it, they didn't want Twitter. But now with Twitter in a downward spiral, we have Twitter users looking for alternatives. That is a separate force at play. And now consider that a subset of Instagram users are also Twitter users. This subset, I believe, represents a good chunk of those 100 million users that downloaded the app and signed in. And because Twitter sucks now and with uncontrollable debt, legacy code and mismanagement will suck more and more over time, this force of users trying to move somewhere will stick around. This is why Meta is moving into this space now. As for it being a single network in two apps, sure. For now. This is just the bootstrap process. Some Threads users will be new to Instagram, they'd have signed up for Instagram to use Threads. I'd be one of those. So we'll see how things develop. As for the marketing clarity of making it a separate app, instead of a tab in Instagram, sure. But this is about narratives, about stories. The story is "here's this Twitter clone". Most Instagram users won't care and you don't want to disturb them by changing the Instagram app. That'd be bad for them, bad for business. But leveraging the authentication and network in a separate app fashioned after Twitter is a pretty smart move for the overlap of people who DO want Twitter and have Instagram. In time, the apps may merge. But this will only happen if Meta has evidence that the overlap between the two groups is large enough so that merging the apps won't be disruptive to too many users.