This month, Threads announced that it reached 400 million monthly active users — nearly as many as X (née Twitter). That’s almost half a billion people.
Threads is the Big Bang Theory of social media. Bland, boring, largely unoffensive, and somehow, it was the most popular show on television for years. Game of Thrones got the cultural and critical attention, but Old Sheldon retained a steady audience of nearly the same size. At any given time, “Twitter” and “X” are searched somewhere between 12 and 30 times more than “Threads” on Google, according to the search engine’s Trends data. Threads is a popular platform without much of an identity. And maybe that’s a good thing: X’s cultural relevance is inseparable from the constant churn of Elon Musk drama — just like how Game of Thrones‘ cultural legacy is forever tied to its spectacularly bad final season.
Meanwhile, Big Bang Theory delivered consistency: viewers’ expectations were met each week, even if those expectations didn’t reach the heights of what a television show can, or should, be. Threads, likewise, is consistently good at one thing users really want from a social media platform: for their posts to be seen and engaged with. Threads might be boring in comparison to its competitors, but its users say it might be the only place on the internet right now where they don’t feel they are screaming into the void.
And despite Threads’ connection to Meta’s universe of social media platforms, it is a relatively new app — and after speaking with a few Threads power users, I’m convinced its newness and ever-slow rollout of features is where its success lies. This is far from X, which is in a constant state of change and seems to be hemorrhaging users.
It’s more than just “not X”
Meecham Whitson Meriweather, a 38-year-old writer in Brooklyn, decided to join Threads when it launched in 2023. He posted on both X and Threads for a while before, in February of this year, he was kicked off of X entirely. He’s not entirely sure why he was suspended from the social media platform — he was an active user with 58,000 followers at the time — but has a suspicion it was tied to a post he made about X’s owner Musk needing to be “locked up.”
He’s not the only person who left X — by choice or not — after Elon Musk took over the site in 2022. Like other users who fled the platform, he considered alternatives like Mastodon and tried out Bluesky but found his home in Threads, largely because of Meta’s interconnected ecosystem.
“It also just felt more authentic as a text-based app because they already had everything that they needed,” Whitson Meriweather told Mashable. “That was the main draw for me. I’m already seeing people I know here. I can already talk about what I feel like talking about. There’s no weird balance in the feed.”
Not only are all your Threads followers connected to your Instagram or Facebook accounts, but Threads is integrated with ActivityPub, a decentralized protocol that also powers Mastodon, which pushes the platform into federated, open social networking.
He’s since started an on-platform interview series he calls “Loose Threads,” where he interviews people — including Martha Stewart and Pam Anderson — on the app.
Reach without followers
Whitson Meriweather, who writes a Substack newsletter and has published work in Vulture, GQ, and New York Magazine and has 41,500 followers on Threads. But one reason users seem to appreciate Threads is that, much like TikTok, you don’t actually have to have thousands of followers to find decent engagement on the app.
One user, commenting in a Reddit forum questioning who actually uses the app, said they “find it worthwhile” because “you can just say stuff on there under a tag and people will find it and respond.”
“Engagement on [Threads] is really good, and it doesn’t feel like screaming into a void,” the user wrote.
Mashable Trend Report
“Screaming into a void” is often a complaint for social media users without significant followings. David “YoRush” Rushing, a 37-year-old from Charlotte, North Carolina, didn’t have much of a social media presence before coming to Threads. He was on X, but found it to be “toxic” and none of his posts really made an impact. When Meta launched Threads, he was one of the first adopters — and one of his first posts immediately took off.
It was opening night for the NBA, and Threads was new and lacked key features — for instance, a way to search for posts about opening night for the NBA. So he posted asking if there were any NBA Threads users, and it “took off.”
“A lot of conversations jumped off” as a result of that post, he told Mashable. “I was being really intentional about [creating community]. If someone engaged with me, I engaged back.”
After a few weeks, he noticed that it was still really difficult for users to find each other on Threads with its limited features. “So I made a really big community-oriented post and was just like, ‘Hey, this is our opportunity for a fresh start for NBA Threads. These are all the people I’ve met this week who are really into the NBA.”
Now, with more than 87,400 followers, he’s one of the most influential voices in the NBA Threads community.
“NBA Threads is [a] really special [community],” he said. “It’s seen a couple of different iterations because that’s just normal with these platforms. As time goes on, things change. But I really do think it’s still a very unique place where you can go, and you can be the passionate sports fan you are. You’re not constantly facing a barrage of toxicity when you share your opinions or when you jump into a conversation that’s happening.”
Driven by community
According to consumer research company GWI, while users signed up for Threads because of its integration with Instagram, they’re staying because Threads users are “community-focused,” noting there’s a strong overlap between Discord users and Threads users. That’s why Whitson Meriweather loves it for pop culture; Rushing loves it for sports; and Tina Mars, a 36-year-old book marketer and author in California, loves it for the book community.
“Threads is very community-driven,” Mars told Mashable. She really enjoyed Instagram — Bookstagram is a huge community on that platform — but never felt particularly drawn to text-forward platforms like X or Bluesky. She checked out Threads because of its integration with Instagram and immediately found her people. After a year on Threads, Book Threads was one of the top three micro communities on the app.
Book Threads “has its own drama, as these kinds of platforms do, but I do feel like it’s very much community-driven. It’s very chill,” she told Mashable. “[It’s] easy to share your authentic thoughts. It doesn’t have to be curated; it doesn’t even have to be well said. It can be very much in the moment, unplanned, and I think a lot of people really love a space to do that. And a lot of people also were finding a lot more interaction and connection on there than on other platforms as well.”
Will Threads continue to grow?
Meta is a beast. Threads, while relatively quiet, should have been the expected winner of the X replacement battle all along.
It just doesn’t have the same flair as X or Twitter, which could be because Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, went out of his way to ensure politics was downplayed when Threads first launched. (Meta has since backtracked slightly by phasing “civic content” back into Threads “with a more personalized approach.”) The vibe was calmer, and the site was kind of easy to forget. Unless, of course, you logged into your Facebook or Instagram account.
It’s easy to see why Threads picked up so many users in the beginning. Meta has mastered the art of baiting people onto Threads. On Instagram, you’re met with the most viral Threads posts, but the last few words will almost always be cut off, convincing you to click through, and there you have it — an account on Threads, and with that one click, you’re one of the 400 million monthly users of the site. But that was two years ago, and users not only stayed, but more have joined, all while the distance between our cultural obsession with an app and the reality of its use seems vast
Threads is still in its adolescence. It lacks the media ecosystem that made Twitter indispensable for journalists, politicians, and celebrities. But it has something else: sheer scale and Meta’s backing. With Instagram’s 2 billion users as a feeder system, Meta can keep funneling people toward Threads whether they like it or not. And with ActivityPub integration, it has the potential to tap into the wider fediverse, giving it a future that even Twitter never had.
There are still plenty of things users want from Threads, and the Meta team promises they’re working on solutions. But Threads isn’t the X killer. X is the X killer — Threads is just the replacement.
All of the creators I spoke to said since community is so important on the app, they wish there was a way to zone in on it tighter — with something like Circles on X or Close Friends on Instagram. Threads is developing group DMs for this, which isn’t quite the same thing. In all, there’s a lot that creators want from the platform.
“The Threads community, especially the book community, is generating these vibrant, engaging, real conversations,” Mars said, adding that, while she’d love a new Circles-like feature, she’s been elated to see what the Threads community has already built. “I’ve seen this community get a lot of cool opportunities from just posting on Threads. I think it is amazing.”
UPDATE: Aug. 22, 2025, 11:35 a.m. EDT This story has been updated to accurately reflect the timing and number of followers Meecham Whitson Meriweather had when he was suspended from X. We have also clarified Threads’ current approach to political content.
