Okay, but there is some flag that means that going to https://www.threads.net/@instagram works but https://www.threads.net/@nasa doesn’t (even though https://instagram.com/nasa/ is a perfectly valid public Instagram account). This flag is toggled when the Instagram user first signs into Threads. Why can’t Meta just set this flag to false and delete all Threads posts while leaving the Instagram account intact?

That Meta is investigating how to make deletion of your threads history possible without deleting your instagram account is actually in the linked slideshow.

So it may very well wind up being 'just' setting a flag to false, starting a selective deletion and informing the user that the deletion may take several <units of time>.

That's just bs engineering and even shittier way of communicating this technical incompetency to the user. Facebook is like the Russia of tech. Casual, convenient incompetency. Which is not incompetency at all, just evil.

And yet it isn’t. One is a totally new platform and one already exists. You might use your login from one to enter the other, but they could totally delete just your threads account if they wanted.

There isn't a Threads account. You upgrade your Instagram account to work with Threads.

It isn't a different platform, specifically because they didn't want to build up yet another social graph from scratch. Your graph in the Instagram app is your graph in the Threads app. This is somewhat akin to how Messenger isn't a different platform from the rest of Facebook.

There may be a future 'downgrade' function, but removing those orphaned threads posts amounts to a partial deletion of your Instagram account. The text that Meta is investigating this is actually in the slide show, but I don't know if they have said anything about what level of commitment they have given, or timeframe they are shooting for.

UPDATE users SET threads = FALSE WHERE username = ‘foo’

There’s no intrinsic reason it has to be this way other than they built it to be as easy to join as possible.

> There’s no intrinsic reason it has to be this way other than they built it to be as easy to join as possible.

You are hypothecating a LAMP-style stack where they just need to add a flag to their database table and update all their SQL to ignore data from flagged accounts.

I'm hypothecating architectures where it is substantially more difficult than that, such as heavily cached, event-driven microservices with geographic distribution, data locality, and which attempt to comply with various data retention and privacy regulations.

I’m not literally suggesting that as the solution, I’m being illustrative. It doesn’t have to be an impossible to solve problem as they’ve presented it to be.

They haven't presented it as an impossible-to-solve problem, though. They have presented it as something they are evaluating doing.

Does it matter? The "threads bit" isn't set until you click go. They could totally support zeroing that bit back out. Obviously you and I can imagine how that might be super difficult, but it needn't be. More to the point, not everyone would think that way. They just want an "undo".

So technically too hard to "downgrade" your Threads account back to an Instagram account? Odd.