Can you believe Meta’s Twitter-like Threads app is already a year old?
Launched as a way to collect junk from Elon Musk’s X Project, the text-based social app has grown into a serious player in the social media space, piggybacking off Instagram and establishing its own user base, and now seems to have a life of its own.
But is Threads a true competitor to X in this space? Can Threads be a viable alternative for real-time conversational engagement?
And can Threads become the next billion-user app, as Meta envisions?
Well, the performance data from the first year bodes well, but at least the groundwork has been laid for Meta to make Threads more relevant if things go well, or more specifically, if things go badly with X.
As mentioned above, Threads was designed from the start as a response to Elon Musk’s less-than-popular changes at Twitter/X, such as the mass layoffs, loosening of moderation rules, making checkmarks paid, making products paid, etc. But in fact, the biggest change may have been Elon himself and the opinion pieces, pro and con, that he now regularly posts on his X profile.
Indeed, Musk has transformed his public persona through his constant stream-of-consciousness X Feed, and because he’s the app’s most followed user, these posts get pushed to nearly every X user’s feed in some form or another, whether they like it or not, which has been a major driver of abandonment for at least some users.
But that’s not all.
Musk’s first layoffs at the company marked the first big shift away from X in the tech community, and since then, the community has become one of the most active on Threads. Left-leaning political commentators and celebrities also turned their backs on X and started posting on Threads instead. And it was these communities that were the most influential in essentially shifting Twitter discussion to new apps and making X a more active and engaging space.
But at the same time, many other less exposed communities, particularly in sports, are attached to X and have so far shown little interest in re-establishing their networks on another app. X’s focus on instant updates with a real-time feed, combined with the curated “following” lists that users have built over the years, makes it an extremely valuable stream for live events. As such, X remains a key connector, and many important updates still flow first through X posts, just as they once did through tweets.
But at the same time, the initial group of Threads users is gaining traction within the app — albeit at a slower pace than the app’s initial surge, but still growing steadily over time.
This initial surge led to Threads seeing the most account registrations in its history, with 100 million profiles created within days of its initial launch. Just three months later, Threads hit 100 million active users, proving the app’s stickiness. By February of this year, seven months after launch, the number of users had grown to 130 million, and by April, it had hit 150 million.
And today, Meta confirmed that Threads has hit 175 million users in its first 12 months.
That’s a solid user base: By comparison, Reddit has 82 million daily active users and Snapchat has 422 million DAUs.
Of course, a more direct comparison would be to X, which has 250 million daily active users and has remained at that number since November 2022, shortly after Elon took over the app. Threads is approaching that number, and at this point it’s safe to say that Threads is a true rival to Musk’s social project. However, it’s also worth noting that Threads’ growth momentum, while still on an upward trend, has slowed significantly.
Threads gained 7.5 million new active users per month between October 2023 and February this year, but over the last three months, that number has fallen to just 5 million new monthly additions, meaning its growth rate has fallen by more than 30%, and while it’s growing, it’s not attracting large numbers of users at this stage.
Is that a bad sign?
Again, X hasn’t seen any growth in daily active users in the last 2 years, so the fact that Threads is adding 5 million monthly users means a lot in relative terms. Adding 5 million monthly users puts Threads on track to surpass X in active users by October of next year, but that also depends on X not adding new users. A lot could happen in the meantime to change this.
Essentially, Threads still has a way to go to reach many potential users, and that may at least partly have to do with resistance to real-time news content.
This is only partially true: As Meta revealed, the company wants to avoid divisive content like political news and ideological debates, but is happy to deliver real-time news on certain topics like sports and fashion.
As Instagram chief executive Adam Mosseri said (in an interview with Platformer this week):
“It’s great to go on Threads and see what’s happening during the NBA Finals, the Super Bowl, the Met Gala if you’re into fashion, the Grammys and the Emmys. do It needs to be a place for news. I don’t think it’s our role to tell people the political views of people that we don’t follow. I think fundamentally, it creates more problems than it solves.“
This aligns with Meta’s efforts to become a more positive forum for discussion, because essentially, users are tired of their feeds being dominated by political debates and their executives being called to account before Congress.
So while Meta has taken clear steps to avoid political content, it also leaves open the possibility that X could gain an advantage during major real-time events, since Threads as it stands today is fundamentally not designed to provide a live stream of in-the-moment posts.
The company is working on this too. Mosseri said the team is focusing more and more on real-time engagement over time, developing better solutions to keep users updated as news breaks. This would be a big change, but for now resistance to news updates remains a sore point for many.
But if Meta’s indicators show this is the right move, then those complaints may not carry much weight. But could it unintentionally help keep X relevant?
In reality, probably not, since the people who currently support the political discussions on X most would never have come to Threads in the first place, so while this seems like a clear failure on the part of the Threads team, Meta is betting that over time, a more positivity-focused approach will win out.
Whether that’s true or not is unclear, but again, as much as there’s a lot of onus on the Threads team to get things right, the more Musk excites the X user base, the better it works for Threads.
So right now, Threads is in a strong position to eventually overtake and possibly even surpass X as the leading real-time social platform. There are also a lot of factors working in Threads’ favor, and if it can capture some of X’s established communities, like sports or music fans, it could make a bigger difference.
Then there’s advertising and new platforms for marketers to consider. Mosseri said this is in the works, but for now at least, it seems like Threads needs to see some more growth before Meta can make its next move in this space.
