Threads was originally going to live inside the Instagram app
Published on: 2025-07-19 12:59:19
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Instagram boss Adam Mosseri is on the stand today in Meta’s antitrust trial. In trying to prove the social network is not a monopoly, he shared that the Threads app could have been just a feature inside of Instagram.
Meta was working on built-in Threads features for Instagram first to compete with Twitter, which pioneered text-first social media apps. But Mosseri says the team made the “very contentious decision internally” to move the features out of Instagram.
Meta’s team, according to Mosseri, found having Instagram host text posts could be confusing to users since the Twitter-like model is entirely different, where replies and original posts can be equally prominent. Comparatively, on Instagram, and other apps like YouTube and TikTok, replies are subordinated to original posts.
Still, Threads is heavily linked to Instagram. Yo
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