Four years ago, it was confirmed that Elon Musk would acquire Twitter, a platform where he had made a name for himself. However, not everyone was pleased with this development, and several alternatives were launched in connection with the acquisition. Nevertheless, most users appeared to remain on Twitter even after the name change to X and several criticised changes, and few of the services launched at that time are still particularly active.
As Musk came to be seen as an increasingly controversial figure in some circles, the need for an alternative seemed to grow, with Bluesky (created by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey) becoming popular, among others, even though the service has declined in the past year. However, Threads, a service launched by Meta the year after Musk took over Twitter, has been the most successful. Threads is similar to Twitter/X and has an Instagram integration that immediately gave the service a high number of users.
Since then, it has continued to grow, and as Musk has made one controversial statement after another, often targeting Europe in various ways, several X users have loudly complained and switched to other services, while companies have been encouraged to do the same. In September, Threads surpassed X in terms of active users, and now a new report from Forbes (based on Similarweb data) shows that X is not catching up, but that Threads is instead widening the gap:
"Threads had an average of 143.2 million daily active users on mobile devices worldwide in the first 13 days of January, according to Similarweb, a considerable lead over X, which had an average of 126.2 million daily active users over the same period.
"X has lost users over time, with its number of daily active users dropping 11.9% year-over-year as of January, while Threads has made massive gains, recording a 37.8% year-over-year boost in users as of January."
Do you use Threads or X yourself, and have you noticed any changes in the activity on either service?
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