THREADS

Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, renamed it X, fired 80% of the staff, reinstated banned accounts, changed the algorithm, added a subscription tier, and then watched 90% of the most followed accounts go quiet. Meta's Adam Mosseri saw the obvious: there was a massive audience for a Twitter-like experience that was not run by someone who seemed to be actively trying to break it.

Threads launched on July 5, 2023, integrated with Instagram accounts so users could bring their existing following with them, and hit 100 million sign-ups in five days — the fastest app launch in history. The retention question was harder.

Threads is free to use and funded entirely by Meta. It runs native advertising, like Instagram and Facebook.

Meta has not broken out Threads revenue separately, but the model is identical to its other apps: serve ads alongside social content.

Threads short-text social feed, cross-posting to Instagram, fediverse/ActivityPub integration, verified accounts

Threads leveraged Instagram's billion-user install base for distribution — the only startup in history to have instant access to that kind of launch infrastructure. Meta added features aggressively: a web version, hashtags, trending topics, better search.

It joined the ActivityPub protocol (fediverse) so Threads posts could be seen from Mastodon and other decentralized apps, positioning it as a long-term social standard rather than just a Twitter replacement.

Getting people to sign up was trivial — 100 million did it in five days. Getting them to use it daily was not.

Threads had no hashtags, no trending topics, no search beyond usernames, and no desktop app for months. Power users who drove Twitter's real-time conversation culture found Threads slow and shallow.

The app retained casual scrollers better than it retained journalists, political commentators, and the topic experts who made Twitter useful. Feature development was fast but the culture never fully transferred.

Meta Platforms (fully funded internally)