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Threads edges out X in daily mobile users, new data shows
- nemomarx 9mo agoThreads seems to be growing, but I'm also interested in a graph of Twitter usership since the acquisition? The one year view here doesn't really show the full trend. > A year ago, X had twice as many daily active users in the U.S. as it does now also this just doesn't seem to be true, at least according to the graph. it looks like 150m to 125m?
- lurk2 9mo ago> it looks like 150m to 125m The graph shows a decline in Daily Active Users worldwide, not just in the US.
- ohyoutravel 9mo agoI was one of the first 100,000 to join threads, and that seemed to mean I needed to join within hours of access. Really enjoy it, haven’t logged in to twitter in several years.
- unboxingelf 9mo agoWho cares. From one walled garden to the next. Renting identities on permissioned networks is so tiresome.
- free_bip 9mo agoThe irony on this post is palpable.
- shermantanktop 9mo agoIt’s actually not, it’s not apparent what you mean at all. As a result this reads as a comment that doesn’t engage anyone except those who share your particular thoughts. Could you perhaps spell out what irony you are referring to?
- viraptor 9mo agoYou're literally doing the "and yet you participate in society" bit...
- Barrin92 9mo agoThreads is not a walled garden though. It's got Activity Pub integration and you can follow Fediverse accounts already. I think the other way around it's still a work in progress.
- neves 9mo agoTill you can't. Once they all had apis.
- viraptor 9mo agoOne day Facebook used open XMPP so you could chat across networks. It does not anymore. Why would we expect AP integration to survive? Also due to large amount of spam, many instances don't federate with Threads.
- stonogo 9mo agoIt will remain a work in progress forever. There's no incentive to implement anything further.
- coredev_ 9mo agoI care - I care that users are leaving a neo-nazi led platform. Problem might be that the new platform's leader also seems to support the current king, sorry, president.
- amadeuswoo 9mo agoIt's worth noting Threads requires an Instagram account to sign up. That's like a 2B+ user funnel with constant in-app cross-promotion. Not diminishing the growth, but "daily active users" hitting parity with X is a different achievement when you have that kind of distribution baked in Meta
- frizlab 9mo agoI don’t know in the rest of the world, but in France it does not. It is possible to signup using a phone number. I did not signup because email is not supported.
- progval 9mo agoThe EU considers Instagram a "Core Platform Service" (https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_4328 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...), which comes with a bunch of restrictions. Article 5 paragraph 2 of the DMA comes awfully close to what amadeuswoo is describing: > 2. The gatekeeper shall not do any of the following: [...] > (c) cross-use personal data from the relevant core platform service in other services provided separately by the gatekeeper, including other core platform services, and vice versa; and > (d) sign in end users to other services of the gatekeeper in order to combine personal data, so Meta may have decided it's not worth fighting it and removed the requirement for Instagram accounts for people connecting from the EU.
- lurk2 9mo agoAround a third of the people I used to follow on Instagram had it installed. None of them actively posted there, and I suspect if any of them engaged with it, they were engaging with it after seeing content from Threads that had been cross-promoted to Instagram.
- xvxvx 9mo agoI wish someone at X would leak data on the current state of the user base. Clearly it’s filed with abandoned accounts and bots. Musk promised a purge of abandoned accounts when he first took over, and auctioning off usernames, but that went nowhere. Apparently X currently has 561 million active users. It does not feel like that at all. I see the same accounts over and over, many of whom complain about lack of impressions and payouts. Maybe they’re not being shadowbanned or ghosted. There’s just almost no real people using that site.
- hnrodey 9mo agoVast majority on X are silent observers just scrolling, liking and bookmarking.
- coredev_ 9mo agoThis is likely true, but that is also true for other platforms. Like Threads that OP shared.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- extraduder_ire 9mo agoSince a few years ago, you need an account to view what account without a grey checkmark post. This includes realtime delay information from train companies, and outages/incidents from water companies. I know several people who only have accounts for one or both of these reasons, since that information isn't posted elsewhere or as quickly. Without an account, you either get a single page of random popular tweets from that account or an erroneous message saying they haven't posted anything yet.
- lurk2 9mo ago> I see the same accounts over and over, many of whom complain about lack of impressions and payouts. I followed a few accounts on Twitter and their interactions are all way down compared to a few years ago; this has been something of a trend on every network, though, so it might just be that the demographic that followed these accounts aged out of being high engagement users and there are other profiles that account for a greater proportion of overall engagement.
- HNisCIS 9mo agoI don't like this future where we're just trading users between a couple billionaires who all support the trump regime. I especially don't like that all social media is being consolidated to one company (Facebook/Meta) just like all of journalism is consolidating into one company. Bring back the anti trust.
- reddalo 9mo agoLuckily, we have alternatives: Bluesky, Mastodon. Even Lemmy is a great alternative to Reddit nowadays (I'd say, even better than Reddit). It has a bit of a Hacker News vibe, but on different subjects.
- browningstreet 9mo agoI've weaned off Meta and X entirely, but not a single person I know IRL, including family, has. Standing on principle shows you how many people you know wouldn't even consider it.
- padjo 9mo agoI’m on a lovely local mastodon instance with polite people who post interesting things. It feels like internet from a bygone age.
- ciberado 9mo agoCan you please point me to some interesting Lemmy instances? I haven't been able to find anyone with strong activity by myself. Appreciated.
- reddalo 9mo agoYou shouldn't look for interesting Lemmy instances; you can pretty much use any instance and subscribe to interesting _communities_ from there. If English is not your native tongue, I'd suggest you to find an instance in your language, so you can easily see all kinds of content if you filter by "Local". Some random active communities to follow: - https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted - https://mander.xyz/c/science_memes https://mander.xyz/c/science_memes - https://feddit.org/c/europe https://feddit.org/c/europe - https://lemmy.ca/c/pcgaming https://lemmy.ca/c/pcgaming
- terminalshort 9mo agoFor HN posts in the last week Twitter leads Threads 106-2. Not necessarily a representative sample her, but lopsided enough to make me very skeptical of the claim that Threads has more active users.
- ewidar 9mo agoThat's not meaningful, it all depends on what content is shared on the respective platforms.
- seizethecheese 9mo agoNot meaningful in what sense? Sure you’re right, if you mean in the sense of relevancy for the general public. But this definitely is meaningful as it relates to X and Threads relevancy to HN
- graeme 9mo agoInstagram has more users than Twitter, but generates no or few HN posts. Something can be used without generating any notable news or information. I've tried threads. Moderately engaging. Took nothing from it. Twitter has a HN like quality where there's a lot that's unimportant and occasionally you see something you'd see nowhere else.
- terminalshort 9mo agoInstagram is a fundamentally different type of media, whereas Threads is basically a Twitter clone.
- Interesco 9mo agoI've noticed (in people I follow) that many Instagram posts also get posted to threads at the same time (automatically?). I didn't see it in the article, but I wonder how many of these users are posting on Instagram primarily with threads as side effect.
- moate 9mo agoIG/Threads/FB are all a shared ecosystem with co-posting and such. X is an island apart. The network effect is absolutely in play.
- mullingitover 9mo agoI think it's just TikTok eating them alive[1] globally (let's face it, microblogging is simply inferior to short form video when it comes to creating stimulating content), along with the self-own of making themselves overtly The Right-Wing Site and alienating half of the US audience. Musk himself even said: > "For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally? So clearly he knew he was making the site undeserving of public trust and reaping the rewards of that. Also, the site is leaning into creating content that's overtly immoral and downright felonious in many jurisdictions, and this is likely going to catch up with it this year. I would bet this current bad news for them is just the beginning. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1294062/social-media-year-on-year-growth/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1294062/social-media-yea...
- kklisura 9mo agoI've just recently deactivated my account from X/Twitter - I gave it a shot since Elon took it over. It has become a shadow of its former self. I haven't tried Threads yet, I think I'm just gonna pause on these social media for a while.
- nephihaha 9mo ago"Shadow of its former self" Meh, I've seen it before and after. It used to have a lynch mob mentality, but now it doesn't show me the accounts I follow but other people's.
- modeless 9mo ago> it doesn't show me the accounts I follow but other peoples I don't understand this complaint. The "Following" tab is prominent at the top and gives you exactly what you are asking for. It even remembers which tab was selected.
- nephihaha 9mo agoMy complaint is that it doesn't default to "following". It's caught me out a few times. I'm not much interested in curated whatever on social media.
- biophysboy 9mo ago> It used to have a lynch mob mentality Still does?
- nephihaha 9mo agoNot quite in the same way. The folk who did that kind of thing were anti-Musk so most of them left. I suppose there is a right wing group like that too but most of them were driven away earlier.
- biophysboy 9mo ago
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- kristopolous 9mo agoThreads seems to be mostly children in the Spanish speaking world. It's not the same product Social media is once again stubbornly regional both in place and age
- nephihaha 9mo agoThere are reports of a lot of bots on Threads. I don't know anyone who uses it but maybe I hang out with the wrong people.
- kalleboo 9mo agoI would bet the majority of Threads users are Instagram users who ended up clicking through on the clickbait teasers Meta places inside of Instagram. Approx nobody looks at themselves as "A member of the Threads community" they just end up there.
- bobse 9mo ago[dead]
- pavlov 9mo agoThere's a tremendous anchoring bias around people's perceptions of Meta products. "I don't see anyone using [Product N] in my social circle, so it must be doomed." It's been like this for at least ten years. People keep claiming that Facebook has no users anymore and that Meta's numbers must be fake. Americans having no idea how important WhatsApp is elsewhere. Etc. When user bases are measured in billions, you simply can't extrapolate your own anecdotal experience to anything. Some Meta product/feature can be very popular among a hundred disparate groups like "Filipino diaspora" and "Spanish-speaking children" and "North European singles" (and who knows how many more), but your social network has no intersection with these hundreds of millions of people, so you'd never know. You can see many examples of this effect in these comments.
- munk-a 9mo agoIn Europe it's common for businesses to use whatsapp for customer contact and not even be setup to receive phone calls. That despite how unfavorably meta as a whole is viewed. I'd in fact attribute X's steep decline to how much it has become a single message platform and pushed out those niche communities to other technologies. I still remember my own shock at learning how huge of a Brazilian user base Google+ had years after falling into obscurity in the english speaking world.
- wanderingstan 9mo agoMight you be mistaking Orkut for Google+? Orkut was the social network (owned by Google) that was hugely popular in Brazil.
- nebula8804 9mo agoAnd India too I think. I think you can even see your old Orkut data in a Google Takeout (I saw it a few years back)
- qingcharles 9mo agoThis makes me wonder what my Orkut email address was. My Gmail was a beta test one from 2004, so that is post-Orkut.
- drnick1 9mo agoIt's time to move (back) to self-hosted solutions. There is nothing worse than corporate platforms that can "moderate" users for one reason or another. Not so long ago, if you had to share something with the world, you hosted your own webpage. Another unfortunate trend is that laypeople using real names on "social media." It's fine if you are a politician or artist using this as an "official" comms account, but for ordinary people it's just asking for trouble.
- piva00 9mo agoThis will only happen when people get extremely tired of these platforms, and some revolution in discoverability happens so people can found the content they are attracted to with as little friction as these platforms provide. There's no going back to what it was in the late 90s/early 2000s, the audience is different, the way the content is consumed is different, the content itself is very different. Blog networks where you follow through links are not going to be the future. > Not so long ago, if you had to share something with the world, you hosted your own webpage. This is long ago in Internet terms, it's been 15+ years it's not the case, it's unfortunately long in the past.
- reactordev 9mo agoI’ll continue to use neither. All these social media platforms can die. Let’s bring back forums and moderation. I feel like current LLMs can do a good job of flagging content if you give it some rules. I miss the discussions on things like game dev, digital art, programming, math, etc that I used to get from forums that have since all moved to discord and has become a hollowed existence. Maybe this is just me getting old. Mastodon sounded like it could have been the next thing but the whole distributed nature makes it cumbersome. I’ll look into it again. I found that 2025 was the year for me to stop, decompress, research SOTA models and AI stuff, and disconnect from anything not providing in my life.
- r_lee 9mo agoThere's no way this is true lol
- daedrdev 9mo agoApparently about half of Twitter are Japanese users, though many may be Chinese using Japan to access.
- kalleboo 9mo agoI really wish Musk had sold off the Japanese portion of Twitter to Yahoo/SoftBank for a huge cash injection, would have really been nice to have it segregated. I left when my 100% japanese hobby-tuned feed turned into force-injected Musk posts and US politics brainrot even though I avoided engaging with any of it.
- andrekandre 9mo agothat would jive anecdotally for me, where did you get that info btw?
- isx 9mo ago> Instead, Threads’ boost in daily mobile usage may be driven by other factors, including cross-promotions from Meta’s larger social apps like Facebook and Instagram (where Threads is regularly advertised to existing users) This. I use Instagram and every time I scroll through the feed there's a stripe of Threads content, clearly algorithmically chosen to grab attention. The thing is, only the top part of every post is visible, and one needs to download / go to Threads to read the rest and the replies (many posts I've seen are specifically the kind where you're more interested in replies than the post itself).
- neves 9mo agoAre you claiming Zuckerberg is manipulating numbers? I'm speechless!
- wongarsu 9mo agoIt's not manipulating numbers, it's abusing their market position to push another product. Or at least that's what we called it when Microsoft did these things in the 90s. Now it's just how business is done
- another_twist 9mo agoThere's no evidence of Meta actually fudging numbers in their history. Theres a huge lens applied to these numbers. Engagement is their bread and butter and what pays for everything else.
- relaxing 9mo agoFacebook admitted in court it lied about its video advertising numbers.
- another_twist 9mo agoYeah but nothing stopped Twitters CEO to stop doing Nazi salutes in pulic and do their freaking job. He and his mate Dorsey kicked out a guy interested in the job and replaced Twitter with this stupid shit. Either ways unless you follow some prominent academics, most of Twitter is VCs pretending to "get" AI. I was very active there and it seemed to me most content tended to be 1/N type posts with zero content.
- neves 9mo agoGreat! Let's change an evil billionaires platform for another evil billionaire platform. Bluesky is the only decent place (till it isn't).
- krunger 9mo ago[dead]
- oliyoung 9mo agoThe sooner this "communication as entertainment" era of humanity passes the better
- dmix 9mo agoPeople were listening to the radio a hundred years ago and it was filled with entertainment and politics, often mixed together. I doubt human tastes will change any time soon.
- RayVR 9mo agoEvery time I open threads it’s mostly ChatGPT garbage from wannabe tech or finance influencers.
- Geee 9mo agoMeta uses dark patterns to inflate Threads DAU. If you install Threads, it starts sending notifications for suggested posts every day. It also sends notifications on Instagram, and when you click it, it opens a random post on Threads. I don't follow anyone on Threads.
- Mockapapella 9mo agoI have a small-medium following on Threads in the AI/tech space (~7K) and regularly post there, and have started posting on Twitter a little more recently, so I feel like I can provide some extra insight that might be missing in this thread. The exposure to "what's what" in the tech space is clearly better on Twitter and it isn't even close. Nearly all tech news breaks on Twitter first, then flows downstream to Threads. For everything else it's kind of hard to say because I aggressively curate my social media feeds, so I don't get much content outside of my bubble. The tech information I tend to get on Threads is more personal updates on mutuals' projects and niche eureka moments they have. There's maybe a dozen of these that I regularly see and interact with and maybe a couple dozen more that pop up occasionally. But again, this is after aggressively curating my feed and maintaining it for ~3 years. I have a feeling that my efforts could have yielded better results on Twitter had I spent all that time posting and interacting there instead of Threads (or in addition to), hence me increasing my posting there.
- mickelsen 9mo agoDeleted my previous comment, but as they say on X/Twitter right after a banger drops: “I am never deleting this app.”
- extraduder_ire 9mo agoFrom the article, this is only in mobile users specifically. They both have ~150M mobile users. But twitter has about that number of "web" users, whereas threads.com/.net only have about 8.5M users. I can't find a link to the source in TFA, besides the similarweb homepage, nor can I find anything on their website about their methodology. Just two unsourced images on techcrunch of graphs from similarweb. I would really like to know how they are gathering this data.
- CHB0403085482 9mo agoWhy does Threads feel like an Instagram clone with Twitter's formatting?