Can you believe that Meta’s Twitter-like Threads app is a year old already ? The text-based social app, launched in order to gather up cast-offs from Elon Musk’s X project , has risen to become a genuine player in the social media space, piggybacking off of Instagram to establish its own audience, which now does seem to have a life of its own. But is it an actual rival for X in the space? Can Threads become a viable replacement for real-time, conversational engagement? Also, can Threads, as Meta has envisioned, become the next billion-user app ? Well, there are some good and bad signs in its first year of performance data, but at the least, the groundwork has been laid for Meta to build Threads into something more significant. If things go right, or more operatively, if things go wrong on X.
As noted, from the start, Threads was designed as a response to Elon Musk’s less popular changes at Twitter/X, which have included mass layoffs, relaxed moderation rules, forcing users to pay for checkmarks, paywalling elements of the product, and more. But the biggest change may have actually been Elon himself, and the divisive opinions that he now feeds into his X profile on a regular basis. Indeed, Musk has altered his public persona through his constant stream-of-consciousness X feed.
And given that he’s also the most followed user in the app, those posts are also pushed into almost every single X users’ feed, one way or another, whether they like it or not, which, for some .
