Threads has ~100 million monthly active users according to Zuck, while Musk claims ~550 million.

So if you believe that it's fair to say that "people actually use Mastodon" (which has 1.5 million MAUs), then yes — people actually use Threads.

Whenever I revisit Threads, it feels like I'm in the tourist trap of social networks. Celebrities and brands are pushed into my feed, posting vacuous engagement traps.

I felt like I had discoverability issues with Mastodon, and the culture I kept running into there was abrasive. It's all around much better now than it was years ago, and I do seem to get more engagement from strangers than on any of the other networks, but I struggled to stay interested.

Bluesky reminded me of the kind of slower organic growth that you'd typically find in earlier internet communities. The absence of videos and GIFs is, for me, an enormous positive point that I know will eventually give way to popular demand. I like that it's more text-and-images focused, and it seems to be in my sweet spot in terms of... most of what I see feel like thoughtful posts and replies, and not people nakedly building their personal brand.

None of them are going to have the same social cachet as Twitter. It's pretty incredible to see someone spend billions of dollars to completely squander an ecosystem an internationally recognizable brand like that. A fairly unique resource, obliterated by a man-baby with absolutely no concept of the value of the people on the platform he bought.

It has like, 30x more users than Mastodon lol

For now, it's the most viable alternative for Twitter - for now.

But this is in part because Mastodon UX is very complicated for beginners, and BlueSky is slow as hell to make improvements. It still doesn't support sending videos...

I'm really curious as to what will happen when Threads turns on ActivityPub federation for everyone. At that point, Threads and Mastodon will be the same network, aside from servers that have preemptively blocked Threads.

Some people I know use it. I use it from times to times but the crypto community hasn’t really been active there. My guess is that if you have a big instagram following then Threads make a lot of sense.

Threads has picked up quite a bit of steam in a lot of communities recently. Not sure how widespread it is but it seems to be doing fairly well.

There are well over 100m MAU so a lot of people are using it.

And it has reached the #1 position in most of the App Stores around the world.

I heard before that Threads is the number one in app stores. If I look right now (23.12) in the Apple App Store then I can’t find it at all in the top 200 (unless I missed something). I see X on 165 and Telegram for example, but no Threads.

Is it really no. 1 or nearby on Android ?

I don't see it in the top 200 on Android.