Meta says they now have half a billion monthly active users on #Threads.
This is about 100x that of #Bluesky, and about 500x that of #Mastodon, at only about 3 years old. How do *you* explain this?
https://about.fb.com/news/2026/06/meta-launching-new-features-500-million-monthly-threads-users/
@j12t How do I explain it? With the usual Facebook methods: monopoly abuse, dark patterns and fraudulent metrics.
@nemobis If we were take your theory as a working assumption, I think it would still be very worthwhile to understand in detail which aspects of those contribute to which impact. E.g. "endless scroll" produces 10% longer sessions (or whatever the numbers would turn out to be) -- but that, for example, would not explain MAU directly, only session length. Personally I doubt that all of those together can explain 100x+ and we need to understand the rest.
@j12t Meta pushes Threads a lot on Instagram. Seeing that only as I look sometimes on Instagram. Also I personally can't fully exclude that many of those MAU aren't bots.
@gelbphoenix Sure some of those are bots but proportionally, do you think there are more bots on Threads than on Bluesky, for example? First order, should affect all platforms about the same?
There is a question what counts as a Threads user. Not sure they have published their methodology.
@j12t @gelbphoenix Since I shut myself out of both Insta and Threads a while ago, I'm pretty sure I'm not one of them, but I recall that Threads<->Instagram were entwined, no? I mean, Facebook has converted everything to a "Meta" account now anyway and the various services cross-promote in all the apps' feeds.
Frankly - until they publish rigorous statistical methodologies and the data sets for independent peer review, my conclusion is "liars" and I don't have time to waste on them.
@j12t Facebook can easily inflate threads.net MAU by several orders of magnitude by counting as "active user" any person on Instagram who happens to be exposed to threads.net via crossposting of their or someone else's posts.
Instagram ads Cost per Install may be something like 1 $. So I would ask the question, what would the fediverse's MAU be if we had spent 500 M$ on an ad campaign?
@nemobis IMHO ad campaigns can help with sign-up, but not much with retention. I think our problem is more on the retention side (see bluesky numbers) than on the sign-up side.
Agree that they could count that way, and we don't know whether they do. It would be inconsistent with how they count MAUs of their other apps, but that does not mean much ...
@j12t BS retention seems comparable to the fediverse, at least when I look at the decay from peaks in registrations around big events. I have no idea about retention for threads.net: the last third-party figures I've seen are from 2024 (https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/bluesky-sustained-growth/). Is there anything more recent?
My assumption is that every single Instagram user has been forcefully enrolled/exposed to threads.net by 2025, so 500M MAU is at best a 17 % retention on 3G users.
@nemobis you are right it’s a conjecture on my part that retention is a big part of Threads’ MAU growth, but I have no evidence that this is so.
@j12t They opted in everyone that has an Instagram account. Easy as that.
@benpocalypse Is that true? I seem to recall I had to go through sign-up when I did, although it did not require a new account.
@j12t I don't have a Facebook or Instagram account, so I don't know first hand, but I remember that being the case when Threads launched. I can't find any links to corroborate it. I remember them bragging about how many users they had right away to rub it in Twitter's face. I do have a terrible memory though, so I could easily be wrong.
@j12t it’s built by a team of hundred of people with millions in monthly marketing budget and actively pushed to 2B+ Instagram users. It is still impressive of them but the reasons are above.
Jun 16, 2026, 7:53 PM@j12t the real question is: why would we trust vanity metrics released by Meta - which has juiced its numbers so many times in the past? They are amongst the least trustworthy companies in the world! I bet they’re counting Instagram numbers (automatic cross-posting and similar shenanigans)
