Why Threads Got 100 Million Users When Other Twitter Rivals Could Not

Twitter has been ripe for disruption for years now. People love to complain about it or leave in protest of how terrible it’s become. There have been many opportunities for Twitter to be challenged by a decentralized social network that truly empowers users. And there have been quite a few attempts. But none have come close to rivaling Twitter.

Now, thanks to widespread frustration with the excessive power of Elon Musk, a Twitter rival has landed. And no, it’s not the brainchild of some crypto-native start-up. It comes via Meta, another company ruled by an excessively powerful billionaire. That didn’t stop Threads from hitting 100 million users in less than a week.

Emily Parker is CoinDesk’s executive director of global content.

There’s a lesson here, if a painfully obvious one. When it comes to social media, or at least social media at scale, people ultimately care about network effects and ease of use. That’s pretty much it. Yes, it would be nice to have data privacy, higher quality conversations, protection of “free speech” (whatever that means exactly) and maybe greater ownership over your content. But those concerns have yet to prevail.

Before going any further, let’s be clear: Threads will not necessarily be a huge success. Sometimes platforms arrive with a bang only to fade into cultural irrelevance – remember Clubhouse? But again: Threads got 100 million users in five days, and that number could still grow. Rival upstarts simply have not gained that kind of traction. Mastodon claims to have around 2 million monthly active users. It’s hard to get exact numbers for the decentralized social media protocol Nostr, but an estimate based on Damus and Amethyst downloads is likely around 500,000 to 1 million, according to Damus. The invite-only Bluesky had some 50,000 users at the end of April, and since then got at least 58,000 new sign ups. These numbers aren’t bad, but these are the relatively successful rivals, not the ones you haven’t even heard about.

Threads’ early boom basically comes down to Threads’ integration with Instagram, which has over 2 billion monthly active users. In other words, people are already there. People have been saying for years that they yearn for smaller, more intimate platforms, but are often addicted to the potential of virality….