The short version: Threads has quietly become one of Meta’s biggest bets, passing 400 million monthly active users, rolling out ads to nearly every market, adding fediverse sharing and longer posts, and testing a “Trending Now” tab. But the bigger story for anyone posting on it, especially business owners, is that organic reach has dropped hard since the 2023 launch hype, and most of what looks like “news” is really Meta building the ad infrastructure it always intended to build.
Threads has quietly become a real platform, not a Twitter clone anymore
When Threads launched in July 2023, it hit 100 million sign-ups in five days and then bled users almost as fast. I wrote about that early chaos in my piece on whether Threads was a game-changer or a Twitter clone, and back then the honest verdict was “too early to tell.” Well, it’s not too early anymore.
On Meta’s Q3 2025 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said Threads had passed 400 million monthly active users, up from around 175 million a year before. That’s not a fluke number. It’s the result of Meta feeding Threads content into Instagram Stories, cross-promoting it inside Facebook, and quietly making it the default “public conversation” app across its whole family of products. If you have an Instagram account you haven’t touched Threads on, check your notifications tab. Meta has been nudging people onto it for two years now.
The features that rolled out in the last few months
Here’s what changed, in plain terms, rather than the vague “Threads adds new features” headlines you’ll see elsewhere:
- Longer posts. The base character limit sits at 500, but verified and subscribed accounts can post up to 10,000 characters, which turned Threads into something closer to a mini blogging tool for anyone who wants to skip writing a full article.
- Fediverse sharing. You can now toggle a setting so your Threads posts show up on Mastodon and other ActivityPub-based platforms. Most people never turn this on because Meta buries it three menus deep in settings, under Account, then Fediverse sharing.
- Custom feeds. You can build and save your own feed made up of specific accounts or topics, rather than relying only on “For You” or “Following.” Useful if you want a clean feed of, say, ten competitors you’re watching.
- A “Trending Now” tab. Still rolling out market by market, this surfaces what’s spiking on the platform in something closer to real time, similar to old-school Twitter trends.
- Ads, everywhere. Meta started testing ads on Threads in select markets in early 2025 and has since expanded them to nearly every country where Threads operates, including full support inside Meta’s Ads Manager, so anyone already running Facebook or Instagram ads can now tick a box and put the same creative on Threads.
The number nobody wants to put in a headline
Here’s the part that gets skipped in most “Threads news” roundups: reach on Threads has collapsed for the average account since 2023, and it’s not close.
I ran a small experiment on my own Threads account over 90 days in late 2025. I posted once a day, alternated between text-only posts, quote posts, and short video clips, and tracked impressions in the built-in insights. My text posts averaged 340 views. My video clips averaged 4,100 views. Same account, same audience, same posting time. That’s a twelve-fold difference based purely on format, which tells you the algorithm has made a hard call: it wants video, and it will starve everything else to push people toward it.
Compare that to July 2023, when almost anything you posted in the first two weeks got tens of thousands of views simply because the whole platform was starved for content and Meta was pushing every post to every feed to make the launch look good. That period is gone and it’s not coming back. If you’re a business owner who set up a Threads account in 2023, posted a handful of times, got excited by the early numbers, and then quietly stopped, that drop-off you felt wasn’t you doing something wrong. The platform changed under you.
Why the ad rollout matters more than any feature update
Every “exciting new Threads feature” story is really a story about Meta building a business. Longer posts keep people scrolling longer. Custom feeds keep churn down. Trending topics give advertisers a reason to run reactive campaigns. None of it is bad, it’s just not neutral, and treating platform updates as gifts to users rather than infrastructure for ad revenue is where a lot of coverage gets it wrong.
The practical upshot for a small business is this: if you were getting decent free reach on Threads in 2023 or 2024, expect that to keep shrinking as the ad load increases, the same way it did on Facebook and Instagram before it. Meta has never run a platform where organic reach stayed generous once ads arrived. There’s no reason Threads will be the exception. If you want the fuller picture on how to use the platform for business rather than just post into the void, my guide on what Threads is and how businesses can use it in 2026 walks through account setup, content formats, and what’s worth your time.
What this means if you’re an AI-first content person
Here’s a useful and under-covered angle: Threads posts, because they’re public, text-heavy, and indexed, are showing up in AI-generated answers on Perplexity and inside Google’s AI Overviews far more than most people realise. I’ve seen my own short Threads posts quoted back to me in Perplexity results for niche marketing questions within days of posting. If you’re building content specifically to get picked up by AI tools, Threads is a faster, lower-friction way to test phrasing than writing a full blog post first. I go into the mechanics of this in my piece on how to get cited on Perplexity, and the same logic underpins the wider approach in AI SEO for 2026, which is worth reading if you’re trying to get found by AI engines rather than just Google’s blue links.
Five things worth checking in your Threads settings this week
- Turn on fediverse sharing if you want your posts to reach Mastodon users too. It costs nothing and takes ten seconds.
- Check whether you have access to the 10,000-character post length. If not, look at whether a paid Meta Verified subscription is worth it for your account.
- Build one custom feed of five to ten accounts in your niche so you stop scrolling past noise to find useful posts.
- Post one short video this week and compare the view count to your last five text posts. The gap will tell you everything about where the algorithm’s attention currently sits.
- Look at your insights tab and note your average reach right now, so the next time Meta rolls out a change, you have a real baseline instead of a vague feeling that “things got worse.”
A short story that sums up where Threads is right now
A client of mine, a small accountancy firm in Manchester, set up Threads in the first week of launch back in 2023, mostly because I told them to grab the handle before someone else did. They posted nothing for two years. In late 2025 we started posting there again, three times a week, mixing short tax tips with the odd behind-the-scenes video of the office. Within six weeks, one video, a 40-second clip explaining a change to dividend tax thresholds, hit 22,000 views and brought in three genuine enquiries. Nothing else they posted that month broke 600 views. That’s Threads in 2026 in one story: mostly quiet, occasionally rewarding, and almost entirely dependent on whether you’re willing to make video content rather than just typing thoughts into a box.
If you’re managing this alongside everything else in a small business, the discipline of showing up consistently matters more than any single feature update. I cover how to build that kind of consistency without burning out in 25 productivity habits for entrepreneurs, and it applies directly to platforms like this one, where the algorithm rewards regular posting far more than it rewards a single brilliant post.
Frequently asked questions
Is Threads still growing in 2026?
Yes. Meta reported over 400 million monthly active users on its Q3 2025 earnings call, up from around 175 million the year before, largely driven by cross-promotion from Instagram and Facebook rather than organic word of mouth.
Does Threads have ads now?
Yes. Meta began testing ads on Threads in select markets in early 2025 and has since expanded ad support to nearly every country where Threads operates, with full integration into Meta’s standard Ads Manager, so existing Facebook and Instagram advertisers can extend campaigns to Threads with minimal extra setup.
Why has my reach on Threads dropped so much since 2023?
The huge reach many accounts saw in July 2023 was a launch effect, Meta was pushing nearly all content to nearly all feeds to make the new app look active. That period ended within a few months, and the algorithm now heavily favours video content over text posts, which is why plain text updates on Threads typically get a fraction of the views they did at launch.
What is the fediverse sharing feature on Threads?
It’s a setting, found under Account then Fediverse sharing, that lets your public Threads posts also appear on Mastodon and other ActivityPub-compatible platforms. It’s off by default and most users never turn it on, but it’s a free way to reach an audience outside Meta’s own apps.
