- Meta's Threads is no Twitter.
- It also looks like it's on pace to eclipse the old Twitter's user base.
- That's hard to understand. Threads doesn't seem nearly as lively as the old Twitter. What gives?
Threads, the Meta-owned service that isn't supposed to be a Twitter replacement but is also very much supposed to be a Twitter replacement, has 275 million monthly users, says Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg.
Is that a lot?
Well, that depends on how you look at it. Meta, for instance, says it had 3.09 billion monthly users for its Facebook app at the end of 2023.
Snapchat says it averages 850 million monthly users.
The last time Twitter — back when it was called Twitter — reported monthly users in 2019, it said it had 330 million of them.
Meanwhile, Twitter's current owner, Elon Musk, says his service has 600 million monthly users. Here we should note that Elon Musk says all kinds of things all the time. And unlike his competitors, he doesn't report his numbers to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. So, maybe take that one with a grain of salt.
In any case, Meta says Threads is growing very, very fast and has been adding a million sign-ups a day. Back in April, Meta said Threads had 150 million monthly users. Which means it has grown 83% in half a year.
But all of that is hard to square with my experience on Threads. I'm there quite a bit, posting and reading for fun and for work. And it doesn't seem like the place has nearly doubled recently.
This isn't a metrics-based argument — I'm not tracking the engagement for my posts in any serious way. Just a vibes thing. When Threads launched in July 2023, it definitely felt empty, especially compared to what was then still called Twitter. It's picked up since then.
But it certainly doesn't seem anything close to what Twitter was like back in 2019, back when lots of people were calling it a hellsite and also checking it every day.
For giggles, I did the classic lazy reporter gambit and asked people on Threads if it felt like the place has gotten a lot more full recently. The results seem split.
Special shout out to sami3456567, whose bio says he's no fan of "incels, present & future cat ladies, anything remotely French." You'll always have a place in social media, sami.
One reason I may not be noticing that Threads seems more crowded is that some of that growth is coming from people who are unlikely to be posting in English: Meta says a bunch of its recent users have been coming from Japan and Taiwan.
But the most obvious reason Threads can grow so fast is that Meta surfaces Threads posts in Instagram, which does have gazillions of users. Some of them click on Threads posts they see there, and become Threads users that way.
And you can definitely see, or at least feel, the presence of Instagram users who are logging into Threads. They're the people who seem to have wandered into the bar not completely knowing why they're there or what they're supposed to do, and they are prime targets for my colleague Katie Notopoulos.
And it's entirely possible that if I used Threads differently, and wasn't trying to stubbornly use it as a text-centric, news-centric Twitter replacement, I might see more of those fresh-off-the-boat Instagram users. Or more users, period.
But I still want a version of Twitter like the one I spent way too much time on, especially in its early days, when it was way too easy to be naive about how people might behave when you connected a lot of them on the internet without a lot of ground rules. (I made a whole podcast series about that era, RIP.)
Threads doesn't seem like it's ever going to be that, and Meta doesn't seem very interested in trying to make that. Which makes some sense since Meta is in the business of making money, and even on its best days, Twitter wasn't very good at that.
Still, let me add this request to Instagram/Threads boss Adam Mosseri's very long to-do list: If there are this many people hanging out on Threads, can you help me find them? Thanks in advance.