Meta’s Threads app now has 300 million users, with more than 100 million people using the service every day. “Threads continues to have strong momentum,” Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads announcing the new milestone.
Zuckerberg has repeatedly predicted that Threads has a “good chance” of becoming the company’s next billion-user app. While it’s still a ways off from that goal, its growth appears to be accelerating. The app hit 100 million users in the fall of last year, and hit 275 million in early November. On the other hand, Apple revealed that Threads was the second most downloaded app in 2024, behind shopping app Teemu, which topped Apple’s rankings.
Threads could see some big changes in the coming weeks as Meta looks to capitalize on that growth. According to a recent report from The Information, the company is reportedly planning to begin experimenting with the first ads for Threads in early 2025.
Threads isn’t the only app attempting to reclaim the “public square,” as some old users are now leaving the platform known as X. BlueSky has also seen significant growth recently. The decentralized service nearly doubled its user base in November, and currently has more than 25 million users. (The company has never revealed how many of its users visit the site daily.) Though still much smaller than Threads, Meta has taken inspiration from some of BlueSky’s distinctive features in recent weeks, including starter packs and custom feeds.
In October, Instagram head Adam Mosseri admitted the company had “found mistakes and made changes” after users reported their accounts were penalized for using common terms like “saltines” and “cracker.” Earlier this month, Meta’s communications director Andy Stone apologized when users noticed that searches for posts about Austin Tice, the American journalist who disappeared in Syria in 2012, were blocked on the app because the content “may be associated with the sale of drugs.” Stone didn’t offer an explanation, but said the issue had been resolved.
BlueSky, on the other hand, has taken less of a top-down approach to moderation. While the company employs some of its own moderators to enforce “baseline moderation,” users have a lot of control over how much questionable or harmful content they want to see. BlueSky also allows people to create their own moderation services for an even more custom experience.
“Moderation is like governance in many ways,” BlueSky CEO Jay Graber told me earlier this year. “And in setting the norms for a social space, we don’t think one person or one company should make unilateral decisions for an entire ecosystem where people are having public conversations that are important to the state of the world.”