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Growing a social network to 100m MAU in such a short period is the opposite of failing.

And it's not just technical reasons but business ones. Feeding additional data into Instagram ads is going to improve the quality of their targeting engine. Which means Threads is contributing to Meta's bottom line without them having to run ads.

a) is not just technical - it's also about barrier to entry. A more user-friendly solution might have allowed custom handles. That's not the point. Meta want to gobble up other forms of personal data with Threads and retain its value through a link to an ostensibly real person on Instagram. They want you to stay in the bullshit garden and avoid the legwork of linking anonymised data to individuals.

> 100M monthly active users

> it's failing.

I'm sorry, what?