Be careful, if you sign up for Threads using your Instagram account, you may lose all your photos.

Threads, Twitter’s competitor with an Instagram stamp, is now available to everyone. Well, for everyone except European citizens, since the app will be available later (although there is a trick to download it now). In the first hours while the application is available, already has about 10 million usersand with a margin of a billion potential Instagram users.

However, this strength, having Instagram as a gateway, also brings with it a huge challenge. Users who have signed up for Threads using their metasocial network credentials (you can also sign up from a browser) they are in for a nasty surprise.

It turns out that once both profiles are linked and your Threads account is registered with Instagram, both apps are linked forever. There is no problem in this regard, since you buy the parent company and even some other features. The main problem is that if at any point you feel that Thrads is not for you, you will not be able to delete your account.

Or at least you won’t be able to do so without deleting your Instagram account. The app currently does not allow you to delete your Threads account if you used your Instagram account to sign up, and when you want to deactivate the text network, it will definitely ask you to delete Instagram as well:

You cannot delete topics without deleting your Instagram account.

This is standard practice for many of Meta’s “add-ons” to their main social networks. The exact same thing happens with Facebook and Messenger: you can’t delete your messaging account without deleting your Facebook profile.

Since Thread options are out there today, the only thing the new Meta social network allows is the ability to “deactivate” a profile if you don’t want to use it anymore and want to keep your Instagram account. For now, yes, Threads allows you to delete individual posts, but not the entire account.

If you’re one of those concerned about your privacy, this is an important issue that Meta will have to deal with sooner or later. It’s not that Threads is some kind of Instagram child application, since in the future it will also implement the ActivityPub protocol, like Mastodon, that is, it will work as a separate service, at least in the eyes of users, but always tied to your Instagram account.