Adam Mosseri on the first year of Threads
With more than 175 million monthly users, Meta has its sights set on overtaking Twitter
Programming note: With this post, we now go on a short summer break. See you back here July 15.
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A year ago this week, Meta introduced Threads to the world.
The text-based social network, which launched as a kind of extension to Instagram, offered little that was not already available elsewhere. But the exodus from Elon Musk’s X had given Meta an opening it had long craved — to seize the opportunity that Twitter once had to host the world’s most compelling real-time public conversations.
The app made an immediate splash, rocketing to 100 million users faster than any app in history. What followed was a predictable but relatively brief decline. And then, a few months later, Threads began growing again. Today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the app has now surpassed 175 million monthly users.
That might be small relative to Instagram, the juggernaut that lent Threads its following graph in order to boost its growth. But it remains extraordinary for an app that won’t even turn 1 until Friday.