In the wake of Twitter becoming a platform conducive to free speech—thanks, Elon—the radical left went nuts. How dare conservatives be able to say what they want on the internet! In an attempt to stick it to Twitter, the left tried to move over to a left-wing echo chamber Twitter clone called Mastodon. It hasn’t exactly worked out.
Now, Meta has launched its version of Twitter, called Threads, so liberals can have an echo-chamber platform with the censorship of conservative voices they’ve grown accustomed to. They probably should have called it “Safe Spaces” instead of “Threads,” but I digress. A mere 16 hours after launch, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the app had accumulated 30 million signups. Naturally, it was the top free app in Apple’s App Store Thursday morning.
Big yawn. Twitter’s monetizable active-user count is nearly 200 million. So Threads has a long way to go. And, regardless, I’m not impressed by Threads’ sign-up numbers, nor am I convinced that Threads will ever eclipse Twitter, though it arguably has a better shot than Mastodon ever did.
Even with the assistance of some left-wing celebrities, Mastodon has failed to be a threat to Twitter. Sure, it did get a surge of users during the Elon Exodus, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone of note who actually deleted their Twitter accounts or didn’t continue to use Twitter to promote their Mastodon accounts to be exclusive to the rival platform. Why? Because Twitter still offered them something Mastodon couldn’t: wide reach.
Threads does bypass this problem by essentially piggybacking off Instagram. Within Instagram, you can easily tap your way to downloading the Threads app and enjoy a streamlined sign-up process that lets you follow everyone you follow on Instagram. It was inevitable that Threads would get a huge number of sign-ups at launch. That number doesn’t impress me at all. The real question will be how many active users the app sustains over the coming weeks and months.
That’s the only thing that matters.
In June 2011, Google launched its social media platform, Google+, hoping to compete with Facebook. On paper, its launch was a tremendous success. Google’s user base was huge, and anyone with a Google account was prompted to sign up. Naturally, its growth was meteoric compared to its competitors. Google+ hit 25 million users in less than month, a fraction of the time it took MySpace (20 months) and Facebook (36 months). Many were impressed by that feat but failed to see how the growth of Google+ wasn’t comparable to its competitors. Its user experience couldn’t match Facebook’s, and despite having all the advantages of being made by Google, it shut down in 2019.
But here’s where things get sneaky. When it comes to users, Facebook has stacked the deck to boost Threads. According to a report from TechCrunch, not only does the app require an existing Instagram account to sign up, but if you don’t care for Threads, you can’t delete your account without also deleting your Instagram account. This will matter little to users who created Instagram accounts to get on Threads, but it means that countless users with massive Instagram followings aren’t going to delete their Threads accounts, even if they don’t use them. So Threads will naturally have a low account deletion rate—a statistic that Meta will certainly highlight more than its active-users count.
Threads has enough going for it that it will likely survive, but its longterm survival depends on it giving users everything they get out of Twitter, and more.
