Threads attracted two kinds of people: 1. People coming mostly from instagram / tiktok who had never considered using Twitter because it had an established reputation and they knew it wasn't the kind of product for them, and 2. People switching from Twitter because they love Twitter-the-idea but can no longer stand Twitter-the-actual-product-today.
Most of people from group #1 tried it and concluded that yep, it wasn't for them. There is zero surprising about that, and it's where the giant initial numbers came from. But if any of those people stuck around, that's pure bonus.
The more interesting question is what's going on with group #2. Certainly lots of them decided there were too many missing features at launch and kept using Twitter mostly. But that is not a "they'll never check back", those people are still in play for any of Twitter to keep or its competitors to win eventually. But the current DAUs wouldn't be where they are if a significant portion of this group hadn't decided to actually stick around. And that's pretty surprising.
For years the conventional wisdom has been that you can't actually convert users from one social network to another in the exact same niche. You can cut off growth - like instagram adding stories corresponding to Snapchat's growth plateau - but people stay where their existing networks are.
But not this time!
Whereas most social media apps have the cold start problem (the stars need to align such that creators and users show up at the exact same time), Zuckerberg has solved it for Meta.
Threads doesn't need to be a hit on day 1 or even 100 because it has the existing Meta user base that counted on to consume Thread content (whether they like it or not).
For example, I have a FB account but am too lazy/old to sign up for Instagram but I did/do see a lot of Instagram reels that are converted into FB reels - particularly as Instagram reels was starting to take off. I am sure when it is monetizing those views for content creators and advertisers the converted reels get counted.
So while the power Instagram/Thread creaters will likely only push/consume the content in the corresponding app, Meta has the unique platform level ability to push the content to users of all 3 apps (i.e. FB/Insta/Threads).
What percentage have left twitter for threads? Unknown.
Yet not only is Twitter not growing but it’s shrinking.
I think your expectations for success in this vertical are off.
I’d say that’s probably broadly the number of potential Twitter users.
If you think user growth should be exponential to all people in the planet, then that is false.
Source? Musk just tweeted about a new all-time monthly user record. It's not impossible that he would lie, but my impression is not at all that Twitter is shrinking.
There's a whole lot of discussion about Twitter shrinking and high profile people leaving, but they don't. Stephen king comes to mind as a big critic that threatened over and over to leave, but he hasn't.
On the rare occasion he makes non-trivial, falsifiable claims, its pretty common that they turn out to be other-than-accurate, yes.
> but my impression is not at all that Twitter is shrinking.
My impression is that the set of advertisers (not regular Blue users, though they are a different kind of advertiser paying for reach) are narrowing and moving downmarket in a way which would take truly enormous numbers of Blue users to compensate for.
Whether its shrinking or not is somewhat beside the point.
> Whether its shrinking or not is somewhat beside the point.
In a thread entirely about Twitter/threads user count, whether it's shrinking is the entire point.
I have been using Twitter almost since the beginning.
Never have I ever seen this many bots and fake accounts on the platform.
So I would be highly dubious of that user record count.
People were battering down the door for access.
You seriously compare growth at the planet scale with a growth at few universities?
The viral growth you're talking about pretty much never occurs after a huge launch event like this, and is reserved for more methodical releases and/or lower initial starting user counts, e.g. Instagram testing Stories, Facebook growing from college to college.
For all it’s faults I quite enjoying pre-musky Twitter but I completely abandoned the shitshow even before the insane rename. I was an early FB user but left that many years ago around the time of the CA scandal.
Mastrodon is too quirky and challenging to go mainstream which is why I think it will remain great and I’m loving it there.
The same statement holds for Mark Zuckerberg. ;-) (EDIT: and perhaps also Steve Huffman)
Twitter/threads is (or should be) a highly viral application.
New users should find themselves compelled to use the product and compelled to encourage others to use it.
With a 100 million user head start, if they were succeeding this shoukd have immediately resulted in the viral loop being triggered into explosive growth.
It’s a huge failure.
Not necessarily unrecoverable, but absolutely a gargantuan fail.
100,000,000 signups should ignite your viral engine and blast into orbit. Enough functionality to be viral was the MV part of “Minimum Viable” for Threads.