• by Colin Kirkland , July 3, 2024

It has been a big year for Threads. While Meta’s microblogging app still hasn’t surpassed its direct competitor, X, it is growing steadily at 175 million monthly active users, according to a post CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued on Wednesday morning.

Now, the Instagram-adjacent platform must decide where to go from here.

Threads’ premiere last July saw unprecedented growth, reaching 100 million users within the first five days of the app’s launch.

The direct link to Meta’s photo-sharing app Instagram made it especially easy for Instagram users to sign up for the new messaging app at a time when X owner Elon Musk was disrupting what remained of Twitter.

As X lost much of its content-moderation team and underwent a rebranding, Meta positioned Threads to be a friendlier, less volatile option for long-time Twitter users who couldn’t cope with Musk’s takeover.

Threads, however, is still trying to figure out how to be a replacement conversation hub for real-time events, which is X’s primary attraction, while avoiding incendiary messaging around controversial news topics. 

“We’re simply trying to avoid over-promising and under-delivering to an incredibly powerful group, which is a mistake we’ve made as a company many times in the past,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri said last October. 

Early this year, the tech giant announced a cutback on political content recommendations for Threads users, drawing a more definitive line between itself and X, despite having many of the same features. 

However, in a recent interview with Platformer, Mosseri said that “politics are on Threads, and they will always be on Threads,” adding that the company will not prevent people who want to interact with politics to do so.

According to The Verge, Zuckerberg believes Threads could become Meta’s next “billion-user app” by focusing on markets where it can take more market share, like Japan. 

Executives are also reportedly contemplating turning on ads in Threads in 2025. Although plans are not definite, launching ads on the platform could provide advertisers and brands with a potentially  more brand-safe environment to run promotions compared to X, which has scared away major partners due to an onslaught of harmful content appearing alongside their ads. 

“It’s evolving,” Mosseri told Platformer. “I’d like to see us continue to make progress and go even deeper on key verticals.” Mosseri thinks Threads can “gain on NBA Twitter,” “see more in the world of European football” and become a “vibrant” hub for devoted communities. 

Not surprisingly, Mosseri also wants Threads to take a bigger slice of user engagement from X during major events, like the NBA finals, the Super Bowl, the Met Gala and the Grammys.

According to The Verge, much of Threads’ growth is still coming from it being promoted within Instagram, which Mosseri hopes changes over time. “I want it to be more and more independent,” he told Platformer, adding that the Threads team is working on Threads-only accounts and data separation. 

“As we iterate on the product, it’s gonna differentiate more and more,” Mosseri said. 

Threads truly sets itself apart from the traditional social media landscape with its ties to the fediverse, a hub of federated social networks that coexist on the ActivityPub protocol, which hosts microblogging app Mastodon, video streaming app PeerTube, social network Pixelfed and more.

By toggling on fediverse sharing, Threads users who are over 18 years old with public accounts can share content across these other federated platforms so users can reach more followers while curating a more personalized experience. 

Mosseri says that the fediverse is still a long-term bet and isn’t driving a lot of Threads growth, as the team struggles to adapt to a host of data privacy regulations and rules in regards to importing data from outside servers. 

Yet, Meta is working out the kinks in attempts to grow the platform into an idea-sharing powerhouse, which according to Mosseri means getting bigger than Twitter X. “That will take some time,” he says, “but I will consider it a failure if we don’t get there.”