[nebula8804]

>There were no ex-Twitter employees involved in Threads at the time it launched.

This is not what I heard. I heard they hired up tons of prominent ex-Twitter.

>AFAICT, it was a frontend over a pared-down Instagram comment-system.

Do you use it? I do and it does not seem to operate that way. It is a more involved than that.

Yes they did rely on IG's infrastructure to help speed up development but this was a deliberate design choice and I don't blame them: They have this large asset of users and built up infrastructure, might as well use this advantage.