Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Instagram has rolled out an update to the Threads app, and it’s a pretty big change. While Threads previously only allowed you to message close friends (that is, accounts you’d added to your “Close Friends” list on Instagram), you can now use it to message any Instagram user. As planet Earth’s only user of Threads, I am sad.
Okay, so I exaggerated. I’m not the only user of Threads — some 220,000 people were using Instagram’s Threads app as of last year. But that’s less than 0.1 percent of Instagram’s monthly active users, which number more than one billion. And it’s not hard to see why Threads isn’t that popular — it essentially takes some stuff you can already do with Instagram and asks you to do it on a different app.
But I use…