Threads is testing letting you sign up with a Facebook account rather than an Instagram account. The new option, spotted by Social Media Today, doesn't appear to be widely available yet, but is already mentioned in a Meta support article.
Besides making it easier for people who don't have an Instagram account to quickly create an account on Meta's X and Bluesky competitor, this new Facebook sign up option should influence the kind of posts and ads that get recommended to you.
"Signing up to Threads with your Facebook account helps unlock features that work across Threads and Facebook, like using the same login info to access both apps," Meta writes in a support article. "If you create a Threads profile with your Facebook account, we’ll combine your info across Threads and Facebook."
Encouraging users to build their Threads profile using the information and followers they had on Instagram was one of the ways Meta quickly grew its Threads user base. It hasn't always led to the best experience on Threads, though. As it turns out, growth-obsessed Instagram users produce fairly shallow text posts. And because most people's Instagram accounts are associated with their Threads profile, they get served a lot of that subpar engagement bait by default. If you came to Threads looking for the relative wit of X, you'd come away pretty disappointed.
Letting you sign up with Facebook will likely have its own shortcomings (namely, modern Facebook is pretty spammy, too), but it at least acknowledges that what people want from Instagram is different from what they want from Threads.
Meta has made a concerted effort as of late to establish Threads as more of an independent entity. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram at Meta, shared that the company planned to remove "the Instagram graph import from the onboarding flow" back in November 2024. Threads also started testing using its own separate direct messaging inbox in June, after relying on Instagram DMs since launch.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/threads-is-testing-facebook-account-sign-ups-191214734.html?src=rss
