Decrease in Active Users Causes Difficulty for Threads

Threads, Instagram’s app aimed at rivaling Twitter, is encountering substantial obstacles and appears to be rapidly losing its initial popularity in the microblogging sphere.

Rejection of reports

A Forbes report shows that user engagement on this so-called Twitter-killing app has dropped sharply. Despite Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s claims of high daily users, the app’s daily active users are down a whopping 70 percent from their peak in early July. It currently has just 13 million active users, down 44 million from earlier in July.

For comparison, Twitter has around 200 million daily active users. This decline in user engagement would have been a nasty shock for Metal, especially since the start had been phenomenal. This failure to maintain user interest, and that too in such a short period of time, means that users are not interested in threads, except as a novelty. This indicates an uncertain future for the app.

Meta executives remain optimistic and say they are working on introducing additional features to revive the app. But how it’s different or better than Twitter isn’t spelled out. Right now it’s a Twitter clone at best. However, the sharp drop in user activity suggests that Threads needs more than minor tweaks; it needs significant Twitter-plus features to polish its appeal.

Reports also show that Threads’ daily time spent on the app has decreased significantly, with users now spending just 4 minutes on the app compared to the initial 19 minutes, according to Sensor Tower. This has led industry experts to dub Threads a “Twitter killer” that hasn’t lived up to its name. Despite declining engagement, Threads managed to reach the milestone of 150 million user signups.

The app has seen the most significant adoption in certain markets, with India leading the way, accounting for around 32 percent of its total downloads. Brazil follows with about 22 percent of Threads’ installs, and the United States accounts for nearly 16 percent of all downloads.

Fight with Twitter

Threads’ battle against Twitter is proving to be an uphill battle, with a noticeable difference in daily active users. It remains to be seen if Meta can successfully revamp the app and regain user interest, or if Threads will remain a significant competitor in the social media landscape.

And the competition will be even tougher, as Bluesky, led by Jack Dorsey, is likely to remove all restrictions currently in place.