A new Threads feature dropped last week that sounds very minor on the surface: you can now share a Threads post to your Instagram Story without leaving the Threads app. 

However, this tiny quality-of-life update shows how Meta has been systematically building Threads into something that could outlast the entire Twitter-versus-everything drama of our current internet moment.

Meta has never tried to grow Threads the hard way, it walked into the social media race already holding Instagram’s hand; a structural advantage most platforms would trade anything for. In turn, Meta has continued to lean into this interconnectedness rather than let Threads develop a fully independent identity.

Popular Threads posts appear on Facebook, whereas Threads carousels show up in Instagram feeds, and cross-posting from Instagram and Facebook to Threads is frictionless. Now, sharing back from Threads to Instagram Stories is even smoother than before. Every new feature is another bridge between Meta’s properties, and every bridge carries traffic in both directions.

This didn’t happen because Threads is flashier or more innovative than the competition. It happened because Meta understood that, in social media, distribution is everything. Every time a Threads post surfaces in an Instagram Story, Instagram users who haven’t made the jump yet get a low-pressure window into what Threads actually looks like. It’s ambient marketing disguised as a convenience feature.

Essentially, Meta is building Threads into the connective tissue of platforms people already love and use daily. X is louder, Bluesky is cooler among certain crowds, but Threads has something neither of them has: a three-billion-user family of apps it can lean whenever it wants to grow.

And it will keep leaning on them, one small seamless feature at a time, until the question is no longer “have you tried Threads?” but “wait, you’re not on Threads?”

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