Are the Twitter clones in trouble?
A new report says X is resurgent — but it may be missing the bigger picture
Today, in light of some new data and swirling discontent on basically all of these platforms, let’s check in on the health of Bluesky, Threads, and (a sigh that lasts a full hour) X.
In March, when Jay Graber stepped down as Bluesky’s CEO, I noted that it had not been growing for some time. But an important aspect of that story, and one I did not include in that column, is that text-based social networks as a category don’t appear to be growing, either.
On Thursday the market-research firm Apptopia shared new data on usage of the former Twitter and its clones. And while third-party estimates often vary from the companies’ own internal usage metrics, over time I have found that they are useful in understanding platforms’ basic trajectories.
In these cases — at least according to Apptopia — the trajectory basically looks like a down arrow.
Start with Meta’s Threads, which will turn three in July. Daily active users on the platform have declined in seven of the past eight months, Adam Blacker wrote in a blog post on Apptopia. After peaking in October 2024 — just before the US presidential election — daily users are now down 61 percent, Blacker wrote. Global monthly users have held up better, at 388 million — but that’s still down from an estimated 400 million in January of this year.
In the first quarter of 2024, Threads had actually surpassed X in US daily users, according to Apptopia. But while X usage has been generally flat to down, Threads lost users more quickly, the company said.
Meta pushed back strongly on Apptopia’s report, calling it “objectively false.” The company pointed me to a report from another market research firm, eMarketer, which in January predicted that Threads users would grow 19.6 percent this year and would surpass X in users by the end of 2027.
