“BBeing in @Trapos “This week has been a bit like sitting on a half-empty train early in the morning as it slowly starts to fill up with people getting on with horror stories about how bad the service is on the other line,” actor David Harewood posted on Meta’s rival Twitter/X, which by the volume of new members asking “Hey, how does this work?” appeared, at least in the UK, to be seeing an uptick following last week’s far-right riots.
To which some might ask, why did it take the Threads newbies so long? To say that Elon Musk’s tenure as owner of the social network formerly known as Twitter and now rebranded as X has been over-the-top (his final moments include the removal of numerous far-right and extremist accounts and his one-man disinformation campaign around far-right anti-immigrant riots in the UK) would be a criminal understatement.
Before Musk’s acquisition in 2022, there were few alternatives to Twitter, but several have emerged in recent years. There are now Bluesky and Mastodon, which are generally left- or liberal-leaning, and Gab, which is right-leaning, as well as Donald Trump’s Truth Social.
But perhaps the biggest threat to X is Threads, especially since it was launched by Meta, the giant behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. But the question is simple: is it any good?
For author and journalist Sathnam Sanghera, the reasons for moving are simple: “Well, this place is undermining the social fabric of Britain and I’m using it as little as possible, while I wait for it to be regulated,” he explains via X’s DMs. “Systematic abuse has been a problem for me and a lot of people of colour for years.”
But the forces driving change are more the ones that are driving people away from X than the attraction of the new social network that is Threads. “There are some great things about Threads, most notably that it’s tied to Instagram, which is probably the most useful social media platform out there,” Sanghera says. “But there aren’t enough people I want on it… I hope that changes. Or maybe I’m just getting close to the time to quit social media altogether.”
The integration with Instagram, which allows Insta users to open a Threads account with just a couple of clicks, seems to be what has really driven the growth of Threads, which earlier this month hit the milestone of 200 million active users, just a year after its initial launch. In contrast, Bluesky has just 6 million registered accounts and 1.1 million active users, while Mastodon has 15 million registered users, but there is no public data on active users.
“Threads has a huge advantage,” says Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University in New York. “Its built-in user base is made up of celebrities and athletes. If you really want to kick everyone off Twitter, you have to sign Taylor Swift, Chappell Roan and (Italian sportswriter) Fabrizio Romano.”
Bell believes that since all of these users are already on Instagram, it may be easier to attract them to Threads than to persuade them to start from scratch on a completely new social network.
She says it’s a shame, though, as she thinks Threads is a terrible product. “I still get the feeling that it’s a platform designed to compete with Twitter by a company that hates everything about Twitter,” she says. “Threads is boring as hell — in presentation, in engagement, in everything.”
My personal experience trying to test Threads for this article does not suggest that Meta views Threads as some huge, exciting new product that it wants new users to join. Having a following of around 88,000 people has always put me off joining other social networks, so I have never had an Instagram account.
To join Threads, I first had to sign up for Instagram, which, thanks to incomprehensible error messages during registration, took me between 24 and 36 hours. Once I was finally able to create an account on Threads, it was restricted as soon as I followed five accounts. When it was released hours later, it allowed me to follow three more before it was restricted again. I soon gave up.
Those who have found it easier to join the site say that once you’re there, it’s more pleasant than X, though largely for the simple reason that it still has staff involved in moderation and hasn’t been actively trying to attract the far right.
“Threads has a different vibe because, for the most part, it’s a smaller, self-selecting subset of people,” says disinformation researcher Nina Jankowicz. “They’ve typically tested it because want “Something different from Twitter/X. It also helps a lot that they actively moderate and that the site leaders don’t actively promote conspiracy theories.”
All of X’s potential rivals are keen to differentiate themselves from the original: Meta says it doesn’t want Threads to focus on news and current affairs in the same way X does. Mastodon is perhaps the most self-consciously “woke” alternative, with very different rules around content warnings and sharing, leaving Bluesky as the closest experience to the “transgressive,” playful, “old Twitter” that many still miss.
Even some who have had success on Threads from the start have doubts about its real value. Stella Creasy, Labour MP for Walthamstow, has amassed more than 20,000 followers on Threads (she has 166,300 on X), but she has a confession: she has never written an article there.
“I just post on Instagram,” she says, a little guiltily. “So I made FA to make that (following) happen and I don’t participate at all there.”
But that doesn’t mean Creasy is disconnected from social media. She still posts on X and is now in local WhatsApp groups of up to 700 members, meaning her constituents can interact with her very directly. While she says she doesn’t “get” TikTok (“I don’t dare dance in public”), she has created an account there because “local Asian moms were telling me that’s where they are.”
Creasy notes that this dispersion across social media made her job as an MP during the recent unrest even more difficult: trying to connect with the public and provide accurate information is harder on six platforms than on one.
Threads’ success seems to be due to it being a default option: if you’re on Instagram, it’s the easiest one to join, and once you’re there, everything’s fine. But if it seems like other users are acting on autopilot, maybe that’s because they are.
“There’s a certain overload here: I’m in the middle for the sake of being there and I don’t know what to do with it,” Creasy says. “Ironically, that’s why I don’t do Threads. It’s not lost on me that it’s the place where I’m gaining ground, the place where I’m not doing anything.”