Zuckerberg’s threads already have over 100 million profiles – Twitter is going downhill

Social media king Mark Zuckerberg is delighted: The start has “well exceeded our expectations”, said the CEO of Meta on Friday, he will follow with concrete figures on Monday:

Threads was launched last Wednesday by Meta subsidiary Instagram and is probably growing faster than any other online service. By comparison, OpenAI’s ChatGPT took about two months for the first 100 million users, threads less than a week. This is despite the fact that the app is not yet officially available in the app stores in the EU and Switzerland (Android users can still download the installation file from the Internet; the detour for iOS is much more complicated). According to unofficial sources, the first users mainly come from the US, India and Brazil.

According to the US technology portal The Verge, users would not only register but also write messages diligently. The latter is much more meaningful than the huge number of registered profiles. As a reminder, in 2011, Google’s Facebook rival Google+ was considered the fastest growing social network in history. In 2019 it was delisted because only a small minority of registered users were active.

Threads could do the same. Whether it will ever reach the social importance of Twitter is anyone’s guess. But the start was successful.

Why Threads is gaining new users fast

Part of the reason for the rapid growth is that it’s easy to create a Threads profile using an existing Instagram account. Theoretically, more than a billion Instagram users can log in directly without creating a new user account.

What critics describe as a data protection nightmare — a common login and the merging of personal data from several of the company’s apps — is successful from a meta perspective, at least in the short term. The registration process, which is easy for users, means that even without us Europeans, it took Threads just seven hours to reach the ten million user mark. By comparison, Twitter rival Mastodon, launched in 2016, had ten million registered accounts in March 2023, seven years later.

Zuckerberg ignores Europe – for reasons

Meta knows that linking threads to the Instagram account will most likely violate EU law. That is why the app is not offered by us for the time being. Combining personal data from different apps without giving users a choice is especially problematic. Logging into threads without an Instagram account is currently not possible.

In starting Threads, Meta forgoes the multimillion-dollar European market in order to grow outside the EU as quickly as possible – without “disrupting” data protection rules. At first the calculation seems to work.

For classification: The EU recently classified Meta as a so-called gatekeeper company that must meet very strict requirements. Simply put, the EU is trying to prevent abuse by dominant tech companies with its new digital laws. In addition to Meta, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, TikTok operator ByteDance, Microsoft and Samsung also fall under these rules.

Threads is not for news and politics, says Instagram boss

Threads is strikingly similar to Twitter and is apparently Mark Zuckerberg’s head-on assault on Elon Musk. As is well known, the tech billionaires are mortal enemies and Zuckerberg sees the current turbulence on Twitter as an opportunity to get disgruntled Twitter users on board.

On the surface, it sounds odd for Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri to say that Threads isn’t meant to replace Twitter. On the surface, Meta follows a threaded strategy that differs from Twitter.

Mosseri explained that sooner or later political topics and news would also appear in threads, but this was not actively encouraged. He hinted that political issues inevitably attract fake news, so he sees no benefit in Threads becoming a second Twitter. The extra checks and the effort to remove fake news, for example – which is mainly demanded by the EU – are not worth the “extra effort or the extra income”, says Mosseri. Rather, threads are supposed to give people a place for discussions that never warmed to Twitter.

Mosseri would like to set up threads as a platform for harmless topics such as sports, music, fashion and entertainment, but is apparently aware that with the growth of users, players with political goals will also discover the new social network for themselves. He later wrote that the visibility of political topics on threads was not artificially lowered.

Twitter dives

While Threads has hit the ground running, traffic on Twitter seems to have plummeted since Musk took over. At least that’s what an image Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince posted to Threads and Twitter on Sunday suggests.

Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest content delivery networks (CDN) operating on the Internet. Simply put, Cloudflare distributes the content of websites and online services on Cloudflare servers worldwide, resulting in faster content delivery. For example, Cloudflare has good insight into how popular individual websites are. It doesn’t look good for Twitter.