Threads, Meta’s X competitor, is officially a year old. While the site was quickly built with a number of bare-bones features, Meta has continually improved the app to make it a good place for people looking to post on a non-X platform.
The page arrived at the right moment. By last summer, Elon Musk’s takeover of X — which was still called Twitter at the time — had not only seen him willingly lay off much of the company and shut down servers, but also changes with real consequences for the user experience of the site. That site had been very unstable and the main advertisers left, leaving behind cheap ads, garbage products and crypto. Chaotic changes in vetting led first to high-profile impersonations and celebrity suspensions and then to the spread of false information.
Threads held the promise of a social platform without all that baggage — even if the app was pretty bare-bones when it launched on July 5, 2023. Users could publish 500-word text posts. They can embed images or videos in their posts and comment on, like, repost or share those of others. That’s it. Most importantly, because Threads accounts are linked to Instagram accounts, it was relatively easy to get started using the platform.
That was enough to get 100 million users to test the waters in the first five days, beating OpenAI’s two-month run to the same record as ChatGPT. But big features like hashtags and trending topics weren’t part of the experience yet. The only feed available was algorithmic – with no option to only see posts from people you follow – and it was also full of creepy posts from celebrities and brands.
Meta has worked quickly to address the biggest needs. A follow-up feed only came out before the app was a month old. The actual web app launched in August. Now there are hashtags (sort of) and trending topics. The company even added features it probably didn’t need, like a TweetDeck-like web experience, complete with auto-refreshing feeds and the option for ever-present columns filled with feeds, likes, and posts saved just for following.
Some things are still missing, like a dedicated Threads inbox for DMs – The meta has been resistant to this idea, although it is experimenting. But overall, things have changed for the better in the last year.
Another potential differentiator for Threads was a promised integration with federated — and, to the surprise of many, Meta actually seems to be delivering on that. Threads’ protocol of choice is ActivityPub, the decentralized protocol used by Mastodon. The Fediverse integration is in an optional beta right now, and if you enable it, various non-Threads users can follow you, see and like your posts, and their replies will even appear in Threads. However, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has talked about how the feature means creators on the platform aren’t necessarily locked into Threads, which could be comforting for people who want a little more control over their identity. of social media.
A combination of these things makes Threads look more like the 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. have tried to encourage a generally measured atmosphere on the platform and thread the engagement needle without relying on outrage. Not everyone finds the platform’s focus on positivity appealing, including Meta’s choice to keep news and political content at bay and give users options to limit political posts in their feeds. But there may not be much they can do to keep people from flooding the platform with more political content as the US presidential election approaches in November. This will be a big test for her approach.
Whether access helps or hinders the platform, it’s still growing, despite a dip in activity after launch. Themes 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 a higher daily monthly active user count, it’s on a downward trajectory and Threads is on its way to growth. And as of Wednesday, Threads has more than 175 million users.
However, ecosystems are fragmented and Threads is not guaranteed to replace X. There are other competitors. As of this writing, about 5.9 million people either use or have accounts on Bluesky, which is decentralized, but not on the ActivityPub platform that Threads is betting on. That user count might be a drop in the bucket compared to Threads’ user count, but Bluesky is growing and Threads doesn’t seem like it’s even suited to the kind of chaotic content Bluesky’s users produce. Bluesky also has features that Threads hasn’t, like proper DMs and more customizable moderation tools.
And Meta has a long line to bring over many rooted X users, too. Anyone who has spent years building up their list of followers or their following on the platform may not have much reason to leave, especially if the people they care about aren’t migrating away from X. Many communities on X, like EG dubbed “sports Twitter,” haven’t quite made the move to Threads, despite offerings as direct results.
However, Threads is doing quite well after just one year. Much of what made Twitter so compelling is missing, but Musk has thrown a heavy bag of keys into the X machine since he bought it. Maybe all Threads needs to do is be good enough — and be around if that machine finally catches on.