SAN FRANCISCO: After Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and turned it into X, Meta created a rival social network called Threads. It immediately overtook OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the app that reached 100 million sign-ups the fastest.
Since then, Meta and the rest of Silicon Valley have shifted away from social media to focus on artificial intelligence (AI). Threads lost the spotlight.
Even so, the platform never stopped growing. In June, Meta said Threads had amassed 500 million monthly users, a milestone that makes it as popular as Musk’s X.
Threads now increasingly resembles the social message board Reddit, as well as X. Users gravitate to specific communities on the platform, rather than a feed of news, to discuss television episodes, game recaps, celebrity gossip and current events. Among the most popular topics are K-pop, the WNBA, dating, dramedy books and television shows like Heated Rivalry.
Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram, has nurtured Threads by positioning it as a conversational space where news and politics are discussed but are not the main draws. The company has built features around the ways that people use the text-based app, like dedicated sections for communities, rewarding top posters with badges and letting people customise their own algorithms.
Connor Hayes, the head of Threads, said the platform had grown with a guiding principle: “Follow the intent of users.” It has set a goal of reaching 1 billion users, he added. If Threads reaches that target, it will be bigger than Snapchat, which has 956 million users, according to financial filings.
“The way that we describe what success looks like is we want to be the largest and best platform for public conversation,” Hayes, 37, said in an interview.
Threads underlines Meta’s social media strengths in the age of AI, continuing the company’s hot streak with social apps that are used by millions of people. That success renews questions about whether Meta can move beyond its social networking roots.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, has tried in recent years to shift his company into other areas, such as the metaverse and AI. But he has had mixed results, with Meta winding down its flagship metaverse platform in March and battling Google, Anthropic and OpenAI in AI. More recently, Zuckerberg has pushed Meta to create a smartphone app similar to Polymarket and Kalshi, the popular prediction markets.
Zuckerberg has tempered expectations for Threads, saying it could be “a fifth great app in the Family of Apps” behind Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger. On a recent call with investors, he mentioned AI 49 times. He mentioned Threads twice.
Threads is “not a massive project,” he said in July 2023. “Over time, you should expect that we’re going to focus on AI and the metaverse.”
Even so, Melissa Otto, head of research at S&P Global Visible Alpha, said Threads had become an interesting story for Meta that showed momentum and growth. “It’s probably a slow build compared to the magnitude and scale of their other applications, but the potential is there,” she said.
Threads, which debuted in 2023, was initially powered by Instagram, which promoted the app to its 3 billion users. To sign up for a Threads account, users had to link their Instagram account, and they could not delete one without deleting the other.
At the time, Threads was overseen by Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram. Last July, Zuckerberg appointed Hayes, a former vice president of generative AI, to lead Threads as a stand-alone platform.
In October, Hayes introduced community features to Threads, such as giving some groups their own official channels on the app. In December, Threads began providing “community champions,” who are the most frequent posters, special profile designs in the app, and has since helped them host watch parties and in-person events across the country.
Alli Kimmel, 38, who joined Threads in 2025 and is a community champion of a K-pop community with more than 190,000 members, described the vibe of Threads as “a millennial Myspace Wild West.” It is distinct from X and Bluesky, another social media app, and reminiscent of social media from past eras, she said.
“A lot of Threads users are in their 30s and 40s, and it’s more centred on silly, fun, random posts than being a politicised space,” Kimmel said. She spends hours each day on the app posting about Stray Kids, her favourite K-pop band, including sharing photos of its members and hosting discussions about new songs.
Threads has incited a similar sense of millennial nostalgia in Hayes, who compared the app to the early days of Facebook, which he began working for in 2011. As Instagram and Facebook focus more on AI-generated content, the appeal of Threads is the human conversations, he said.
Still, Threads is working to integrate AI, too. In May, it began letting some users tag an AI account called Meta AI to ask it questions, similar to how X uses its Grok chatbot. Some content on Threads is also AI-generated, albeit less than on Instagram and Facebook, the company said.
In January, Threads started showing ads, in Meta’s first move to make money from the platform. The app has not released revenue numbers or data beyond how many users it has.
“It could be the next Facebook, or it could be a huge bust,” Otto of S&P Global Visible Alpha said. “Until they start to reveal the true engagement, we’ll never really know.” – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
