Check out Instagram’s delightful easter egg for Threads

As we reported yesterday, Meta’s Twitter competitor is launching on Thursday, July 6. Instagram is gearing up for that with a delightful little easter egg to advertise Threads.

Entering “threads” into the Instagram search field (h/t Mike Isaac) will result in a red ticket at the end of the bar. Tapping brings up a ticket that includes the app’s logo on one side with more details, including 7 a.m. PT, on the other. It includes your username and a QR code for threads.net/download. As of today, Android is listed as “Coming soon” even though the Play Store listing is already live in certain countries. (For everyone else, the link takes you to a Google Play error page.) 

Hopefully, this Instagram easter egg will be a preview of other delightful experiences found in Threads. If the team is able to spend time adding these bits of whimsy, it bodes well for Meta’s Twitter competitor being polished and user-friendly out of the gate. (It’s also a sign of how Instagram can be leveraged to promote Threads.)

This is in comparison to Bluesky, which still has a pretty janky Android app after 2.5 months, and Mastodon. The big 2.0 Material You update they released last week does a great deal to make the experience nicer, but the service is still more complex than it should be at its core for a wider audience.

Many believe that Threads will offer a polished experience, like the main Instagram app and service, on day one. This is of course due to Meta’s massive cloud infrastructure and workforce. 

Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how Threads will launch on Thursday. Does Meta need to limit sign-ups at first to scale, or will it be reliable enough to handle the load? If it’s the latter (or even if minor hiccups are limited to a few days), Threads will have a tremendous advantage.