At scale? Not in a few weeks, and not with all the features, but the core features don't seem like a stretch for a small team, without scale in a couple months.
Meta/Instagram luckily already have a large scale social network, tons of money, and tons of engineers and a codebase that deals in users and text and images already, so it's a pretty good head start.
I don't really understand what you're getting at here. I don't see how indexing is a "special sauce"; Facebook has a larger network size than Twitter does and as far as I can tell it indexes all of its posts. What major social sites other than Tumblr/Mastodon don't have functioning search?
How important is refined search to a social network with no legacy content to search through? Surely that's something they can put off for N months and just accept whatever caption and relevancy limitations Instagram search imposes?
not necessarily on day one.. this is why threads only have search for users at the moment..
that is what everyone is doing now.. search for the people they care to follow..
They can work a few more days on that and add it in a update down the line.. by the time thread has enough content that search is important you can bet that search will be there..
i like the theory that they lunched now, sooner then originally planned, to surf on the mess that twitter made on the last few days. This would explain why threads is so incomplete in some areas, but probably will match all twitter features soon enough..
Meta/Instagram luckily already have a large scale social network, tons of money, and tons of engineers and a codebase that deals in users and text and images already, so it's a pretty good head start.