Instagram

Or nearly $17/mth to use both. That’s what Meta is reportedly pitching EU regulators who want Zuck and Co to stop using personal data to target ads at European citizens without their consent. The bloc’s users could have three options by the end of this month: pay up, use for free but agree to personalized ads, or quit, with the latter looking very tempting.

Well, this video is weirdly hypnotic. I think I watched it four times in a row? Anyway, uh, the Fed’s on Instagram and Threads.

Adam Mosseri asked about Artifact supporting publishers in a post on Threads — so my colleague Alex Heath asked him in an audience question.

“We’ve tried to come at this from a publisher friendly perspective,” Mike Krieger said. Artifact thrives if the publisher ecosystem “is healthy and thriving,” so that approach is a long-term play.

“It’s about recognizing what needs to exist several years from now for you to have a viable product,” Krieger said

Soon after Meta’s Instagram-based Twitter competitor launched, some of the millions of people who activated Threads noticed a small issue. Once you create an account on Threads, the only way to delete it is to delete your Instagram account, too.

However, Meta chief privacy officer Michel Protti said during the TechCrunch Disrupt event that Meta will launch individual deletion for Threads accounts by December. Another situation it’s working on handling is fediverse support for situations like “what happens when a Threads post goes to another server and is then deleted by the author.”

Sometime Wednesday morning, Threads on the web started showing a little red dot over the notifications tab. The notification dot had been a big omission to the web experience, so I’m glad Meta added it in.

Adam Mosseri says he tested the feature out on Wednesday for a quote post. Quote posts are one of the biggest omissions from the Threads web experience, so I’m really hoping it launches soon.

Now we just need Threads to not default to the “For You” feed every time I open it up.

The feature was apparently spotted in Monday’s Instagram update on iOS. Instagram has been experimenting with a handful of generative AI-related features, including labels for AI-generated content, so it’s not too surprising that AI-created panoramas might be part of Instagram’s feature lineup.

We’ve asked Instagram if it can share more details about this.

Apparently a bunch of Taylors are being badly moderated by Instagram:

“This afternoon, hundreds of people named Taylor (myself included) had their Instagram accounts disabled for a violation of community guidelines- simply because our profiles had our names listed,” one affected Taylor, Taylor Camp, told Bloomberg via email. Even some accounts that added the phrase “Taylor’s version” to their Instagram handle — a reference to her re-recorded tracks — had their accounts restricted.

Instagram confirmed it had disabled some accounts “in error.”

Sorry, the “group chat.”

In an era where a lot of frequent social-media users are sick of being “perceived” and having hundreds, or even thousands, of eyes on them, many are retreating to the days of tighter connections and communities. 

What’s old is new again, I guess. See you all on IRC!

I saw this post from Dare Obasanjo highlighting Meta’s on-Threads message about its commitment to the fediverse. You can see the message yourself by going to somebody’s profile and clicking the “threads.net” bubble.

Meta has already taken a small fediverse step, and I’m looking forward to seeing the eventual support for platforms like Mastodon. It can be the new thing we all beg for now that web Threads is live.

“This is an early v1,” Tom Bender, a PM on the Threads team, said in a post. “We’re painfully aware of the feature gaps and it’s going to improve quickly.”

A bunch of my colleagues at The Verge have just gotten access, so check threads.net to see if you can post from the web, too. I should warn you that the web app isn’t quite as robust as the mobile app — there’s no notification dot when you have notifications! — but it works well enough.

We’ve known the date for Meta’s next developer event since the company revealed the details of its Quest 3 headset, and now there’s more information available.

The two full days of programming will include a Keynote hosted by Mark Zuckerberg, the Developer State of the Union, and breakout sessions covering a range of topics related to AI and virtual, mixed, and augmented reality. Those who attend in person will also have access to demo experiences, networking events, and more.