Meta’s Threads which was touted as the alternative to Twitter saw a huge surge in sign-ups when it was launched on 5th July and became the fastest platform to get 100 million users. However, there was a fast decline in the number of active users on the app in the last couple of weeks and one reason for this could be the decrease of the hype that was created during the launch of the platform.

Within the first few hours of its launch on 5th July, Threads got 5 million user registrations and within less than a week at least 100 million people had signed up for the app. But, three weeks later, the active daily use or the number of users who engage with the site on a daily basis dropped, from a peak of 49 million on 7th July to 12 million on 22nd July, according to Similarweb. According to the data released, even on the busiest day, Threads had less than half active users as that of Twitter. “Most of those who still use Twitter regularly will continue doing so at about the same rate,” said David Carr, senior insights manager at Similarweb.

Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg was however unaffected by this data and said that he was optimistic about the platform, “Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly 10s of millions of people now come back daily,” he wrote. “That's way ahead of what we expected. The focus for the rest of the year is improving the basics and retention. It'll take time to stabilize, but once we nail that then we'll focus on growing the community. We've run this playbook many times (FB, IG, Stories, Reels, etc) and I'm confident Threads is on a good path too.”

In spite of Mark Zuckerberg’s optimism, it doesn’t seem that Threads will dethrone Twitter any time soon as it hasn’t been able to keep its users on the platform which Twitter does very well. This is partly due to the fact that Threads does not some of Twitter’s basic functionalities which include a desktop option and place to search hashtags, phrases and names. It is also not known how much an impact will the transition from Twitter to X under Elon Musk will have on the platform.

Elon Musk had recently announced the transition of Twitter to ‘X’ which somewhat officially means that the demise of Twitter is here. Elon Musk had removed the logo of Twitter from the building and has installed a ‘X’ sign. The apps and desktops also now show the platform as ‘X’ instead of Twitter. ‘X’ can basically be said to be the dream platform that Elon has been wanting to build for a long time as an alternative to Twitter.