• Threads, Meta’s Twitter rival, was launched one year ago, almost exactly.
• After amassing a huge number of users in a short time after launch, usage of the app has slowed significantly.
• Threads is now at 175 million monthly users, but is still struggling to keep people on the platform.

One year ago, Facebook and WhatsApp owner Meta timed the launch of their Twitter, now X, rival app Threads to coincide with a wave of resentment over negatively received changes Elon Musk was making on his social media platform to huge success – seeing over 10 million sign-ups in a few hours.

However, the timing of the launch proved to be a drawback for the company, as Threads was pushed out too early, and the app was unfinished, not even having a desktop version available at the time. Over the next few months Threads’ ballooning usage growth – quickly reaching 50 million users – began to stabilise and then petered out.

By August, one month after launching, Threads usage fell from around 50 million daily active users down to around 10 million, as the Instagram-run app was unable to keep interest.

Similarweb wrote at the time that “Threads arrived on the scene during the latest flurry of controversies at Twitter, which had not yet rebranded itself as X but had annoyed active users with rate limits on posts, giving them extra incentive to look at an alternative.”

“Threads may still have a better chance of becoming ‘the new Twitter’ than some other alternatives, but it needs to provide its users with more reasons to keep coming back.”

So now, almost exactly one year later, how is Threads managing along? The answer is: it’s doing ok.

According to a post on Thursday from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Threads is now managing 175 million monthly active users. Notably, the metric has moved from daily to monthly, denoting a slowing down in usage, but still represents a sustainable and marketable population of users.

The change could also mean that Threads is getting a lot of pop-ins from users, instead of users staying on the app for a portion of time. This is likely because for many users, Threads being promoted from within its larger brother Instagram is how they find the app. Being able to just use your Instagram account to sign in to Threads is also an added benefit, removing significant friction.

But there just doesn’t seem to be anything really keeping users on Threads.

While companies and brand accounts use Threads as another social media to post on, the average user still can’t use hashtags to find trending stories to add their two cents to, and while experimental changes to X like Grok AI’s news summaries have added ways to discover what is happening in the world, Threads continues to exist in a strange sort of bubble.

Real-world news may not even be what Threads wants, as Meta has enforced policies that decrease the spread of hard news on the platform and especially politics, instead, its users are encouraged by executives and algorithms to post light-hearted content – “Sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment, etc.,” Instagram lead Adam Mosseri explained to the The Verge last year.

But this is not what former Twitter users may have been looking for, emerging last year in great numbers to find a true alternative sans Musk. Most of the changes to the app have either been cosmetic or quality-of-life changes, neither of which adjusts the way you discover new content on the app. It remains an extension of your Instagram instead of a standalone platform.

This has not been working for Threads so far, as the app hasn’t yet managed to turn a profit, but with usage on the increase, maybe there will be something to Zuckerberg’s assertions that Threads will hit a billion users at some point. Hey, it took Uber 14 years to turn a profit, tech companies nowadays are in it for the long haul.