A year ago, Meta—the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—launched a new social app called Threads. (I wrote about the launch and also did a Q&A with my CJR colleague Jon Allsop about my early experiences with the service.) More than a hundred million users signed up in a matter of days, making it one of the fastest-growing new apps in history. The meteoric growth rate eventually slowed; some users no doubt moved on after the initial flurry of interest subsided. But the app soon started to grow again. Last Wednesday, with Threads’ first birthday approaching, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s co-founder and CEO, announced that the service now has more than a hundred and seventy five million monthly users, up twenty five million from April. Adam Mosseri, who runs Threads, said in an interview with Platformer’s Casey Newton last week that whatever the numbers might be, “all the key metrics that I care about most are growing,” including daily impressions and time spent on the app per day.
That, it would seem, is more than can be said for X, formerly known as Twitter: NBC reported in March that data from two research firms, along with figures published by X, suggest that its numbers are heading in the opposite direction. In February, X had 27 million daily active users of its mobile app in the US, down 18 percent from a year earlier according to the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower; indeed, the app’s US user base has been either flat or down every month since November 2022, when Elon Musk acquired it. Per Sensor Tower, usage of the app has fallen by almost 25 percent since the acquisition went through. X says it has 250 million daily active users in total, a figure which would put the service roughly back where it was before Musk bought the company (though it hasn’t been confirmed by a third party).
While it may be approaching X in terms of user numbers, however, some observers believe that Threads still has a way to go before it can assume the position that Twitter used to have in the social media marketplace. Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post, for example, argued in a recent piece that while Threads may have many users, it is missing one crucial component of a successful social media platform: influencers. A number of content creators told Lorenz that they aren’t convinced they need to be on the platform and that they “don’t consider it important.” One management company told Lorenz that the creators they represent don’t post on Threads, adding that most would “forget it’s there if it wasn’t for the automatic notifications.” Lia Haberman, a digital strategist who writes a newsletter on the creator economy, told Lorenz that Threads “still seems like a platform in search of a mission. The focus isn’t news. It’s not about visual creativity or video, like Instagram or TikTok. So what is it?”
Note: this post was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
Haberman’s comment highlights one of the other challenges facing Threads if it intends to supersede Twitter: namely, its lack of interest in political news and commentary. This has been an issue from the moment Threads launched. In an interview at the time with Alex Heath of The Verge, Mosseri said that the app would not “do anything to encourage” the sharing of news, on the grounds that the negativity that comes with it isn’t worth the “incremental engagement or revenue.” Threads, Mosseri said, could appeal to more than enough communities—sports, music, fashion, entertainment, and so on—without having to make everything about news. He later clarified that Threads was not going to down-rank news in its algorithm, but added that the app wouldn’t actively promote it either. He also said that Meta had been “too quick to promise too much to the [news] industry on Facebook in the early 2010s,” and that the company believed it would be “a mistake to repeat that.”
Mosseri reiterated many of these points a year later, in his interview with Newton. He said that “politics are on Threads, and they will always be on Threads”—and that the service doesn’t plan to “get between people and political content that they follow just because it’s political”—but added that he doesn’t think it’s the platform’s place to “be showing you political takes from people you don’t follow.” Doing so, Mosseri argued, would create more problems than it solves and put the platform in a “pretty precarious situation” while being “a presumptuous thing to do. Could you maybe drive some more attention through that? Probably. Is that really worth it? Worth the risks that come along with it? Worth the anger might create with the mistakes you might make? Hard to say that it’s worth that.”
When it comes to growth strategies, Mosseri and others involved in building Threads seem to favor expanding their reach rather than catering to short-term engagement driven by emotion. The method they have chosen to do that is called “federation”—the idea of connecting Threads to a group of loosely affiliated, open-source social apps known collectively as the “fediverse.” (I wrote about this strategy for CJR back in January.) Threads announced at launch that it planned to open itself up to the fediverse; there was widespread skepticism that this would actually happen, but as of December, some users with Threads accounts can check a box and have their account connected to Mastodon, a Twitter clone that is one of the most popular social apps in the fediverse. Doing this allows their posts to be shared to users of Mastodon, thereby allowing people who don’t have Threads accounts to follow friends on that service.
When he announced the feature, Zuckerberg said that making Threads interoperable “will give people more choice over how they interact and it will help content reach more people,” adding that he was “pretty optimistic about this.” Federation hasn’t been universally welcomed by users of Mastodon and other fediverse apps, however—indeed, many of them sought out those alternative networks at least in part because they didn’t like Meta and its policies. Because every Mastodon server is an autonomous unit with its own rules, the operators of specific servers can block Threads and refuse to allow its posts to appear, and many have. At the moment, Threads’ connection to the fediverse is still in the experimental phase and therefore only available to certain users in certain countries, but Meta has said that it hopes to roll it out to all users soon. In his interview with Newton, Mosseri called the fediverse “a long-term bet”; it isn’t currently driving a lot of Threads growth, he said, but “we’re committed to it, and we’re making progress.”
Threads may be the largest pretender to the Twitter throne, but it is hardly the only one—indeed, Mastodon has itself been mooted as a possible successor in the event of X’s heat death. Interestingly, while Threads may have shied away from political news and courting journalists, Mastodon seems to be going in the opposite direction: earlier this month, the service started publishing author bylines alongside articles when they are shown in the app, a feature that is confined to a single Mastodon server for now but is expected to be rolled out to others. Eugen Rochko, the creator of Mastodon, wrote that the new feature was designed to “reinforce and encourage Mastodon as the go-to place for journalism.” Clicking on a byline opens the author’s associated fediverse account, if they have one; this, Rochko said, will highlight writers and journalists that are active in the fediverse, and make it “easier than ever to follow them and keep up with their future work—potentially across different publications.” (According to The Verge, media outlets will have to reach out to Mastodon in order to get their journalists’ profiles highlighted in this way.)
Other Twitter contenders for the throne have included Nostr and Bluesky, both of which have a connection to Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter. Dorsey started Bluesky while he was still at Twitter, as an open-source alternative, but recently vacated his board seat and appears to have become more involved with Nostr, a social app that uses public-key cryptography and claims to be censorship-proof. But Bluesky is still evolving: it recently started offering a direct message feature similar to Twitter’s, and it announced in April that heads of state were allowed to open accounts, something that the service had previously blocked. Last year, the app rolled out My Feeds, a unique feature that allows users to choose a different recommendation algorithm from a list of more than fifty, as a way of changing the type of content that they see. In March, Jay Graber, the CEO, said that the company would replace the “master algorithm” favored by its rivals with “an open and diverse ‘marketplace of algorithms.’”
Some early pretendants have since given up their dreams. One, Post.news, was founded by Noam Bardin, the former CEO of the satnav company Waze, and backed by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz; it launched in November 2022, offering, among other features, ad-free access to paywalled content from publishers such as Fortune, Business Insider, Wired, and the Boston Globe for a few cents per article. But in April, Post.news shut down. Bardin wrote that it was “not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform,” adding that a consumer business “needs to show rapid consumer adoption and we have not managed to find the right product combination to make it happen.”
Bardin’s point raises an important question: how long will Meta spend subsidizing the growth and operation of Threads if it can’t achieve the revenue goals the company requires of all its assets? It’s great that Threads has accumulated 175 million users in only a year, but if it doesn’t have the influencers and content creators that Lorenz mentioned it is going to find it difficult to attract advertising and other types of revenue—and if it doesn’t have journalists and news junkies, it will likely struggle for relevance. Joining the “fediverse” is a nice strategic move, but it’s still an open question how much it will mean in terms of growth or revenue. Ultimately, one question will be key if Threads is to ever knock X from its perch: is Zuckerberg willing to fund it indefinitely?