The influencers and brands are already there

Yeah, this is an underrated point. The huge advantage that Instagram has over Mastodon and Bluesk is everyone is already on it. The bootstrap problem is already solved. By the world's least ethical company. It sucks but this is how we live in the Age of Scale.

> everyone is already on it

and can start being fed notifications and UI for the other thing at a moment's notice.

so you think they're also aiming at reddit?

> I think the Instagram branding is deliberate.

I think so to, which says a lot about Meta. They understand full well that the Facebook brand is tarnished, irrelevant, or at the very least "old hat". You couldn't launch a new product under the Facebook brand if you wanted to.

The brand under which they launch isn't relevant though, they aren't going to compete with Twitter. The users they'd need to lure over are well aware that Instagram is Meta/Facebook/Zuckerberg and will not even try the platform on that basis alone. It's the same reason that their Metaverse doesn't stand a chance, none of the users who would normally be early adopters wants anything to do with them.

Unless they somehow roles Threads into Instagram I don't see this being a massively successful platform.

The users they need to lure over are athletes, musicians, artists, actors etc. They all are already on Instagram, so they can use Threads while maintaining all their followers.

That's not really who I associate with Twitter. If they want to compete with Twitter isn't it business people, politicians, journalists and "thought leaders" they need to move?