Twitter traffic falls off a cliff while Meta’s Threads passes 100 million users with more features on the horizon

Twitter has been slowly dying since Elon Musk took over last year with its value dropping to under half what he paid for it.  Recently they also limited the amount of Tweets free users get to see on the social media platform. 

It seems a strange way to run a social media company where making money depends on getting more ads in front of more eyeballs.  Less eyeballs means less people seeing ads which means less money.  The drop in the amount of traffic Twitter is seeing has been quantified by Cloudfare which said that Twitter’s traffic was down 5% for the first two days Threads from Meta was available and down a whopping 11% on this time last year.

With Elon taking crude, childish pot shots at Mark Zuckerberg, he seems to not be handling it well at all and he would be even more disturbed to hear that Threads has already surpassed 100 million sign ups over the weekend – and that’s without it being available in Europe just yet.

Even though Threads is tied to an already successful social media platform the number of signups is impressive leading to Elon threatening legal action after some former Twitter employees (deemed superfluous by Elon and sacked) moved over the Meta to work on their projects.

Some are suggesting that Twitters latest misstep with rate-limiting users and self-DDOSing themselves Meta released Threads out into the wild early, before all the usual features were built in, to take advantage of their poor service delivery.  

What is on the way for Threads?

Hashtags

Hashtags are currently unusable in Threads will soon be clickable making it easy for you to explore topics you are interested in.

Chronological feed of only users you follow

At the moment you can only see a feed based on what the algorithm guesses you want to see.  Soon you will be able to see a feed that just shows the people you follow.   Instagram and Facebook already have these feeds so it follows that Meta are bringing it to Threads as well.

Open access Threads?

Instagram chief, Adam Mosseri, stated that they have plans to make Threads compatible with ActivityPub, an open social networking protocol.  If this occurs, it will allow opportunities for interaction between Threads and other social networking platforms such as Mastodon and WordPress.  It will allow users of services which use ActivityPub to see and interact with Threads posts, without any requirement for a Threads account.

Editing posts

So many users have posted something on social media only to notice a spelling or mistake later on.  Unfortunately, with some networks you cannot edit your post – at least without paying a monthly fee.  Editing a post of Threads is on the list too according to Adam Mosseri, hopefully not locked behind a paywall as it is on Twitter.

Multiple accounts

The Instagram app allows you to switch between multiple accounts without having to log out but at this stage Threads does not have this feature.  This too is also on the list of upcoming features

Other

• Search for content
• Graph syncing
• Messaging
• Translate posts

It seems that there is a lot of what we would normally consider basic social media functionality yet to arrive on Threads. We suspect that this half-baked version of Threads is designed to strike on Twitter while the iron is hot, and Twitter is floundering.

Meta and Threads had better add these features before too long because users won’t hang around forever waiting for them to bring this basic functionality.