Straight answer: Threads peaked at roughly 100 million sign-ups in under five days in July 2023, then daily use collapsed by around 80 percent within weeks. Since then Meta has rebuilt it into a search-enabled, ad-supported, algorithm-first platform with over 300 million monthly users, but most of that growth is dormant Instagram accounts rather than people posting. I’ve had a presence there since day one, and the platform I post on now is a different animal to the one everyone signed up for.
The peak, and the crash nobody talks about anymore
Threads launched on 5 July 2023 and hit 100 million sign-ups in under five days, which at the time made it the fastest-growing consumer app ever, faster than ChatGPT’s early climb. I remember the day it opened. Everyone I knew in marketing was on it within hours because Meta let you carry your Instagram followers over with one tap, so you woke up with an audience you hadn’t earned yet.
Then it fell off a cliff. Sensor Tower and Similarweb both tracked daily active users dropping from a peak of around 49 million on day one to under 10 million by mid-August 2023, a fall of roughly 80 percent in about six weeks. Reuters and The Verge both covered the crash at the time, and it became the go-to example of a hype launch with no retention plan. There was no algorithm worth talking about, no search function so you couldn’t find your own old posts, no web version for the first month, and honestly, no clear reason to open it twice a day once the novelty wore off.
That’s the bit most “Threads is thriving” articles skip past now. They start the story from 2024 onwards, once the recovery had already begun, and they don’t mention how badly it stumbled first.
What changed after the crash
Meta didn’t abandon it, which is the interesting part. Most companies would have quietly let a dead app rot. Instead they spent about eighteen months rebuilding the core experience piece by piece.
Search and basic usability
Full-text search didn’t arrive until October 2023, three months after launch, which sounds unbelievable now but was true. You couldn’t search for a keyword or find your own post from last week. A web version, a following feed you could pin as default, saved posts, and trending topics all followed through late 2023 and into 2024. These weren’t exciting features. They were the basic furniture every other social app already had, and Threads shipped them one at a time over more than a year.
The fediverse move
In December 2023, Threads began integrating with the fediverse through the ActivityPub protocol, letting posts show up on Mastodon and other decentralised platforms. This was a unusual move for Meta, a company not known for playing nicely with open protocols. It didn’t move the needle on mainstream growth, but it signalled that Threads wanted to be seen as open infrastructure rather than a walled garden, which matters for how developers and journalists have talked about it since.
Ads arrived, then widened
Meta started testing ads on Threads in the US in January 2024, then expanded to more countries and more advertiser types through 2024 and 2025. By mid-2025 Threads ads were available inside the same Meta Ads Manager most businesses already use for Facebook and Instagram, which was the real turning point commercially. It stopped being a side project and became a proper Meta revenue line, sitting alongside Reels and Stories in the same buying dashboard.
The algorithm rewrite
This is the change that mattered most for anyone trying to build a presence there. In its first few months Threads leaned heavily on your existing follow graph, so if 5,000 of your Instagram followers came over, your posts were mostly shown to them, in something close to chronological order. Through 2024, Meta pushed Threads much harder toward an interest-based feed, closer to how TikTok’s For You page works, where posts get distributed based on predicted engagement rather than who you follow. Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram and Threads, has said publicly and repeatedly that follower count matters less on Threads than it does on Instagram, and that a small account can outperform a huge one if the post itself is good. On paper that’s a fairer system. In practice it turned Threads into an engagement-bait machine, which I’ll come back to.
What posting there feels like now, from someone who’s done it for two and a half years
I joined on launch day with roughly 3,000 followers carried over from Instagram. In the first two weeks, with almost no competition and everyone’s curiosity switched on, a throwaway post of mine about a client mistake got over 50,000 views. That number meant almost nothing because reach was artificially inflated across the whole platform, everyone’s numbers were huge, and it wasn’t repeatable.
By September 2023, once the crash had happened, the same kind of post was getting under 500 views. That’s the part that surprised people who’d only experienced week one. It felt like the platform had died, because for most casual users it had.
I kept posting anyway, roughly twice a day, mostly short opinions on AI tools and marketing, because I’d rather show up consistently on a quiet platform than chase whatever is loud that month. By 2025 the algorithm changes had made a real difference, not because Threads got busier overall, but because the interest-based feed started surfacing my posts to people who’d never followed me but who engage with AI and marketing content. My typical post now sits between 3,000 and 8,000 views, with the occasional one going past 40,000 when it hits a nerve, usually something opinionated about AI tools that people either agree with hard or argue with hard. Replies drive that more than likes do. A post with 40 replies and 90 likes will outperform a post with 400 likes and 3 replies, every time, because the algorithm reads replies as a stronger signal of a good post than likes.
That single fact changed how I write for the platform. Threads rewards a slightly provocative, one-line opinion far more than a polished paragraph, which is uncomfortable to admit as someone who cares about writing well.
The uncomfortable number the growth headlines skip
Meta has said Threads passed 300 million monthly active users through 2025, with Mark Zuckerberg citing similar figures on earnings calls. That number gets repeated constantly as proof the app “recovered.” It’s true, and it’s also close to meaningless on its own.
Monthly active users on Threads includes anyone who opened the app or even just scrolled a feed once that month, and a large chunk of those accounts were auto-created when someone activated their Instagram profile for Threads and never posted a single thing. Meta doesn’t break out a separate figure for accounts that have posted, versus accounts that exist and lurk, and that omission is doing a lot of work in every “Threads is booming” article you’ll read.
From what I’ve watched happen inside my own network of roughly 400 people I know personally who signed up in the first week, maybe 30 of them still post anything at all now, and fewer than 10 post regularly. That’s not a scientific sample, but it lines up with the broader pattern independent researchers have flagged: Threads has genuine growth in total accounts and total scrolling time, but the base of people creating content is thin, and a good chunk of what fills feeds is exactly the kind of short, argument-baiting one-liner the algorithm favours, not because it’s good writing but because it’s engineered to get replies. That’s the uncomfortable bit most coverage of Threads avoids saying plainly: the platform got its numbers back partly by rewarding a shallower kind of post than the one that made people curious about Threads in the first place.
Should you still bother with it in 2026
Yes, but with the right expectations. Threads in 2026 is not the ground floor opportunity it was in July 2023, and anyone telling you it’s an easy free-reach platform is describing week one, not now. What it is instead is a low-cost, low-effort channel that rewards consistency and a clear point of view more than it rewards production value or a big existing following, which is different from Instagram and LinkedIn.
If you’re a small business owner, I’d treat it the way I treat it myself: post short, opinionated, specific things twice a day if you can manage it, expect a slow build rather than a viral moment, and don’t bother investing in graphics or video for it, because text and a single photo perform just as well or better. If you’re weighing up whether Threads deserves a spot in a wider AI and content strategy for your business, that’s exactly the kind of question I work through with clients as an AI consultant for small businesses, because the platform choice matters far less than having a clear, repeatable system behind it.
Related reading: instagram threads reddit.
Frequently asked questions
Did Threads ever recover its launch-week numbers?
Not in daily active use during the same period, no. The initial peak of around 49 million daily active users in July 2023 fell roughly 80 percent within six weeks, and while Meta reports over 300 million monthly active users by 2025, that’s a different metric measured differently, and it includes large numbers of dormant Instagram-linked accounts rather than daily active posters.
What’s the single biggest change to how Threads works since launch?
The shift from a follow-graph feed to an interest-based algorithm through 2024, similar in spirit to TikTok’s For You page, so that reach now depends much more on how engaging a specific post is than on how many followers the account has.
Are ads on Threads worth it for a small business?
Ads became widely available through the standard Meta Ads Manager by mid-2025, so if you already run Facebook or Instagram ads, adding Threads as a placement costs almost nothing extra to test. Results vary a lot by niche, and it’s still a smaller, cheaper pool than Instagram or Facebook, which makes it a reasonable low-risk test rather than a primary channel.
Is it too late to build a following on Threads now?
No, because the interest-based algorithm means a new account with zero followers can still get meaningful reach on a single good post, which isn’t true on most other platforms. It’s slower and less dramatic than the first two weeks of Threads’ existence, but consistent posting still works.
