People love to complain about [Twitter] or leave in protest of how terrible it’s become, but Threads has landed and hit 100 million users in less than a week. What can we learn from this?
Threads’ early boom basically comes down to its integration with Instagram, which has over 2 billion monthly active users. People are already there, and onboarding is easy. People have been saying for years that they yearn for smaller, more intimate platforms, but are often addicted to the potential of virality.
Threads’ success has lessons not only for social media start-ups, but also for crypto as it pursues mainstream adoption. Sometimes you might have to play ball with bigger players, at least initially. Onboarding and ease of use matters a lot. And people care about data privacy and decentralization, but not that much.
These are the key lessons from Threads’ spectacular five days. 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.