Threads, Meta X’s competitor, is officially one year old. While the website was hastily built with a bare-bones feature set, Meta has been steadily improving the app to make it a decent place for people who want to post on a non-X platform.
The site arrived at the right time. Last summer, Elon Musk’s takeover of X — which was then called Twitter — not only saw him arbitrarily fire huge chunks of the company and shut down servers, but also made changes with real consequences for the site’s user experience. The site was very unstable and the main advertisers fled, leaving behind cheap junk product ads and crypto ads. Chaotic verification changes led first to impersonation and celebrity suspensions, and then to the spread of false information.
Threads had the promise of a social platform without all that baggage — even though the app was pretty bare-bones when it launched on July 5, 2023. Users could publish text posts of 500 words. They could embed images or videos in their posts and comment, like, repost or share them with others. That’s about all. Crucially, because Threads accounts are tied to Instagram accounts, it was relatively easy to get started using the platform.
That was enough for 100 million users to test the waters in the first five days, beating OpenAI’s two-month run to the same record with ChatGPT. But big features like hashtags and trending topics weren’t part of the experience yet. The only available feed was algorithmic – with no option to only show posts from people you follow – and it was also cluttered with sneering posts from celebrities and brands.
Meta worked quickly to solve the biggest needs. The watch-only feed was launched before the app was a month old. The actual web app was launched in August. Now there are hashtags (sort of) and trending topics. The company even added features it probably didn’t need, such as a TweetDeck-like web experience, complete with auto-refreshing feeds and the option of always-present columns filled with only watchable feeds, likes, and saved posts.
Some things are still missing, like a dedicated Threads box for DMs – Meta has resisted the idea, although it’s experimenting. But overall, things have changed for the better over the past year.
Another potential differentiator for Threads was the promised integration with fedivers – and to the surprise of many, Meta seems to be delivering on that. The Threads protocol is ActivityPub, a decentralized protocol used by Mastodon. The Fediverse integration is in optional beta right now, and if you turn it on, Fediverse users can follow you, see and like your posts, and their replies will even appear in threads. Still, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri talked about how the feature will mean creators on the platform won’t necessarily be locked into threads, which could be reassuring for people who want a little more control over their social media identity.
Some combination of these things makes Threads look the most like an heir apparent to Twitter’s former crown. But Threads is not guaranteed to replace X.
Not everyone finds the platform’s focus on positivity appealing
Mosseri and Co. tried to promote a generally measured atmosphere on the platform and thread the needle without relying on outrage. Not everyone finds the platform’s focus on positivity appealing, including Meta’s decision to keep news and political content at their fingertips and provide users with options to limit political posts on their channels. However, with the US presidential election looming in November, there may not be much it can do to keep people from flooding the platform with more political content. This will be a big test of his approach.
Whether this approach helps or hinders the platform, it continues to grow, despite a drop in post-launch activity. Threads expanded to Europe in July, and four months later Mark Zuckerberg told investors it had about 150 million monthly active users. This month, analytics firm Similarweb found that while Twitter still has higher daily monthly active users, it’s on a downward trajectory and Threads is on the way up. And as of Wednesday, Threads has more than 175 million users.
Even so, the ecosystems are fragmented and Threads is not guaranteed to replace X. There are other competitors. At the time of writing, about 5.9 million people use or have accounts on Bluesky, which is decentralized, but not the ActivityPub platform that Threads is betting on. This number of users may be a drop off compared to the number of Threads users, but Bluesky is growing and Threads doesn’t seem to be doing well with the kind of messy content that Bluesky users are producing. Bluesky also has features that Threads didn’t introduce, like a proper DM and more customizable moderation tools.
And the Meta has a long line of hoeing to bring in a lot of rooted X users as well. Anyone who has spent years building their list of followers or their own following on the platform may not have much reason to leave, especially if the people they care about don’t migrate away from X. Many communities on X, such as the one called “sports Twitter” haven’t fully moved to Threads, despite preludes like live scores.
Still, Threads is doing pretty well after just a year. Much of what made Twitter so compelling is missing, but Musk has thrown a heavy bag of keys into the X machines since he bought it. Maybe all Threads needs to do is be good enough — and be around if the machinery finally takes over.