Don’t expect Threads to take over Twitter any time soon

It’s been a challenging year for Twitter. Now in its Elon Musk era, the social platform’s name officially became X (though I will continue to call it Twitter in this article), lost millions of users, and is now being boycotted by advertisers.

It seems like people should be looking for alternatives — but we have one. In early July 2023, Meta released “Threads.” The text-based social media app surpassed 150 million downloads in less than two weeks and peaked at roughly 50 million active users. The buzz faded quickly, and usership declined just as fast as it rose. By October, it was estimated that Threads had five times fewer active users than it did in July.

For a while, it felt like everyone was talking about Threads, but it had a problem: People weren’t actually talking on Threads.

Twitter’s projections for 2024 aren’t looking favorable, and this should provide an opportunity for Threads to gain favor. Most likely, that won’t happen, because the platform isn’t offering what Twitter users are looking for.

Why did people leave Threads?

It’s not a huge shock that millions of people signed up for Threads once it was released. The platform was linked to Instagram — a social network that has over 2 billion users. This made it easy to…