Meta’s Threads has surpassed 500 million monthly users, the company said on Tuesday, nearly three years after it launched to chase Elon Musk’s X.
That’s 100 million more than last August, and puts Mark Zuckerberg within the goal of 1 billion users that he set on the first day.
Along with the milestone, Threads is shipping a feature that its competitor doesn’t have. ‘Your Algo’ allows you to privately tell the app to show you more or less headlines, for one, three or seven days.
It builds on February’s ‘Dear Algo’, which does the same thing but only with public posts. Your Algo keeps the request for you, and is starting to roll out in the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand, in line with Threads’ rolling regional approach, which made it to the EU months after its US debut.
Relying on communities and live chat
Meta also hosts Wired ‘Communities’, topic spaces for the likes of basketball, K-pop and books, outside of beta, with a discovery hub to help people find top contributor badges. The company credits communities for ‘all’ the recent daily user growth, the same betting competitors are doing: Bluesky has built its strategy around group discussions and communities.
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Its Live Chats feature, real-time tweets from events like the World Cup, will hit the public in July. Braids boss Connor Hayes framed it as a ‘second screen’ that suits the app’s quiet feel ‘in a world where so much socializing is video-centric and loud’.
Together, the move targets the one thing X still does best: timing. Threads started without search, hashtags or chronological feeds, and has spent two years opening them up, down to desktop direct messages. The algo controls and live chats are its bid to finally get X out of the real-time chat, while maintaining a cool tone.
Meta numbers are not shared
The figure of 500 million monthly users is a flattering metric. Meta will not provide a current daily active number, which reflects actual participation, and the last one it disclosed was 150 million, back in October.
It says daily users are ‘growing exponentially’, and that growth is now organic, with more people opening Threads directly than going to Instagram. It also refers to Asia, where the time spent increases by 80 percent in South Korea and 130 percent in Japan year on year, and notes that BTS recently joined, gaining 4.2 million followers in days.
The context is important: external trackers have recently estimated the Threads base has been shrinking, so Meta’s growth claim is partly counterintuitive. And the app still doesn’t make a reasonable amount of money. It added ads to 200 countries this year, but Meta’s chief financial officer said in April that Threads would not be a ‘reasonable driver’ of revenue by 2026.
There is a limit to the new control, too. Your Algo requests intentionally expire after a week, so Meta keeps the final say on your feed. You can nudge the algorithm, but you can’t take the wheel, unlike Bluesky, which relies on giving users their full control.
