“Being on @Threads this week has been a bit like sitting on a half-empty train early in the morning while it slowly starts to fill up with people jumping on with horror stories about how bad the service is on the other line,” posted the actor David Harewood on Meta’s Twitter/X rival, which from the volume of new joiners asking “Hey, how does this work?” appeared, in the UK at least, to be having a post far-right riots bounce last week.
To which some might ask, what’s taken the Threads newbies so long? To say Elon Musk’s tenure as the owner of the social network formerly known as Twitter and now renamed X has been unconscionable – recent highlights include unbanning numerous far-right and extremist accounts and his one-man misinformation campaign about the UK’s far-right anti-immigrant riots – would be a criminal understatement.
Few alternatives to Twitter existed before Musk’s 2022 takeover – but several have popped up in the past few years. There is now Bluesky and Mastodon, which generally lean left or liberal, and on the right Gab, plus Donald Trump’s Truth Social network.
But perhaps the one which poses the biggest threat to X is Threads – not least because it was launched by Meta, the behemoth behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. But the simple question remains: is it any good?
For the author and journalist Sathnam Sanghera, the reasons for moving are simple: “Well, this place is undermining the very social fabric of Britain and I’m using it as little as possible, while holding out for it to get regulated,” he explains via X’s direct messaging. “The systematic abuse has been a problem for me, and lots of people of colour, for years.”
The forces behind switching, though, are very much those pushing people away from X, rather than the attraction of the hot new social network that is Threads. “Threads has some great things about it, not least that it is linked to Instagram, which is probably the most useful social media platform around,” Sanghera says. “But not enough of the people I love are on it … I hope this will change. Or maybe I’m just getting closer to the time of quitting 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 fuelled the growth of Threads, which earlier this month hit the milestone of 200 million active users, just a year after its initial launch. By contrast, Bluesky has just 6 million registered accounts and 1.1 million active users, while Mastodon has 15 million registered users, but no public data on active ones.
“Threads has one huge advantage,” says Emily Bell, director of the Tow centre for digital journalism at Columbia University, New York. “Its built-in user base of celebrities and sportspeople – If you want to really drive everyone off Twitter, you need to nab Taylor Swift, Chappell Roan and [Italian sports journalist] Fabrizio Romano.”
Because all of these users are on Instagram already, Bell thinks, it may be easier to attract them to Threads than it is to persuade them to start from scratch on an entirely new social network.
She says this is a pity, though, as she believes Threads is a terrible product. “It still feels like a platform designed to compete with Twitter by a company that hates everything about Twitter to me,” she says. “Threads is just deathly dull: in presentation, in participation, in everything.”
My personal experience of attempting to try Threads for this article does not suggest Meta regards Threads as a huge, exciting new product it wants new users to join. Having an X following of about 88,000 has always deterred me from joining other social networks, so I have never had an Instagram account.
To join Threads, I first needed to join Instagram – which, thanks to incomprehensible error messages during registration, took about 24-36 hours. Once I could finally create a Threads account, it was restricted as soon as I followed five accounts. When it was unrestricted hours later, it allowed me to follow three more before it was restricted again. I soon gave up.
Those who have had an easier time joining the site say that once you’re there, it’s more pleasant than X – though largely for the simple reason it still has staff engaging in moderation, and hasn’t actively been trying to attract the far right.
“Threads has a different vibe because, for the most part, it’s a smaller, self-selected subset of people,” says misinformation researcher Nina Jankowicz. “They have typically tried it out because they want something different than Twitter/X. It also definitely helps that they are actively moderating and that the leadership of the site isn’t actively promoting conspiracy theories.”
All of the would-be X rivals are keen to differentiate themselves from the original: Meta says it does not want Threads to centre on news and current affairs in the same way X does. Mastodon is perhaps the most consciously “woke” of the alternatives, with very different norms on content warnings and sharing – leaving Bluesky the closest experience to the “transgressive”, playful, “old Twitter” still missed by many.
Even some of those who have had early success on Threads are somewhat dubious of its actual value. Stella Creasy, the Labour MP for Walthamstow, has built up a following of more than 20,000 on Threads (she has 166,300 on X). But she has a confession: she’s never actually written a post there.
“I just cross-post my Instagram,” she says, somewhat guiltily. “So I’ve done FA to make that [following] happen and don’t engage at all there.”
That doesn’t mean Creasy is disengaged from social media, though. She still posts to X, and is now in local WhatsApp groups of up to 700 members, meaning her constituents can engage with her very directly. While she says she doesn’t “get” TikTok – “I can’t bring myself to dance in public” – she has created an account there because “the local Asian mums were saying to me that’s where they are”.
Creasy notes this social media dispersal made her job as an MP during the recent unrest all the more difficult – trying to connect with audiences and provide accurate information is harder on six platforms than it is on one.
The success Threads has had seems to be because it’s an easy default: if you’re on Instagram, it’s the easiest one to join, and once you’re there, it’s … fine. But if it seems like the other users are acting on autopilot, perhaps it’s because they are.
“There’s a bit of overload going on here – being on the medium for the sake of it and not knowing what to do with it,” Creasy says. “Ironically, that’s why I don’t do Threads. It’s not lost on me that’s the place where I am picking up traction – the place where I am doing nothing.”