Meta-owned threads took the world by storm when the social network launched not that long ago. Amid ongoing frustration with Elon Musk's Twitter and confusion over competitors like Mastodon, Threads launched and quickly acquired 100 million users. But how many are still hanging around a little while later?
According to Meta, not all that many. In fact, more than half of those 100 million users are no longer active on the platform although CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn't seem all that worried about the revelation.
Reuters reports that Zuckerberg dropped the bombshell during an employee call that was heard by the outlet. During that call, Zuckerberg said that retention on the platform was actually better than executives had expected, although it wasn't perfect. He went on to say that it would ideally have been "awesome" if all of those 100 million people had stuck around. Or "even half of them," he said, suggesting that more than 50 million Threads users are no longer actively using the social network.
However, it's thought that engagement and user retention will improve as Threads adds more and more features in the near future. The addition of a new timeline that only shows content from people that a person is following is a welcome one, but that only landed a few days ago and will take time to have a meaningful impact.
Other features are of course planned, and we can expect Threads to grow significantly in the next months and years. Whether it will be the answer for erstwhile Twitter users remains to be seen, however.