Meta Threads — 100 Million Sign-Ups in Five Days

On 5 July 2023, Meta launched Threads, an Instagram-linked text-based social network, in over 100 countries. 10 million sign-ups in seven hours, 70 million in two days, 100 million in five days—each figure posted by Mark Zuckerberg himself on Threads, and each of them a count of registrations, not of people who stayed. On 10 July he wrote that Threads had "just passed 100 million sign ups over the weekend", adding that this was "mostly organic demand and we haven't even turned on many promotions yet."

Keep the word sign-ups in view: it is the whole story of the next month. The comparison everyone reached for—ChatGPT taking two months to 100 million—was not the same measurement at all, being an outside estimate of monthly active users rather than a registration count published by the vendor.

Why the Sign-Ups Came So Fast — Sitting on Top of Instagram

The dominant reason for Threads' exponential start was simple: Meta brought an existing social graph along wholesale. Sign-up was tied to an Instagram account; username, profile photo, and follow graph migrated with a single tap. Instagram had about two billion monthly active users at the time. If even five percent of them tapped through, you reach 100 million registrations in days.

The launch was also a deliberate raid on Twitter, then in the middle of the Musk-era chaos and freshly under "rate-limit exceeded" rules (temporary daily read caps announced on 1 July: 6,000 posts for verified accounts, 600 for unverified, 300 for new unverified). In the launch week Zuckerberg posted: "It'll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn't nailed it. Hopefully we will." The amplified spectacle of a Musk-vs-Zuckerberg "cage match" did not hurt traffic.

A Five-Month EU Delay — The DMA Barrier

Threads at launch was unavailable across the 27 EU member states. The reason was uncertainty about the Digital Markets Act (DMA, in force from November 2022, with gatekeeper obligations applying from March 2024). The cross-service data integration between Instagram and Threads—core to the product's design—risked falling foul of the DMA's prohibition on gatekeepers combining personal data across services without explicit consent.

EU access arrived on 14 December 2023, five months and nine days after the US launch. Meta's answer to the DMA was to unbundle the Instagram tie: EU users could create a Threads profile connected to their Instagram account or browse Threads without a profile at all. The episode made visible, again, the way European regulation (GDPR, DMA, the DSA) delays and reshapes US-built consumer products.

The Initial Crash — Sign-Ups Are Not Users

Behind the "fastest to 100 million" headline, the retention was brutal. Sensor Tower put daily active users down 82% from launch as of 31 July, at about eight million a day, against a peak of roughly 44 million the day after release. Similarweb measured the same shape: a peak near 49 million on 7 July down to just over 11 million by 29 July. Time spent collapsed alongside: 19 minutes a day and 14 app opens on launch day, 2.9 minutes and 2.6 sessions by 1 August.

Most of the new sign-ups were one-time visits—let me see what the Twitter alternative is like—and did not stick. The product was rough: weak search, no hashtags, no direct messages, an algorithm-driven feed with no straight chronological Following view. Twitter power users complained loudly.

Meta responded across late 2023 and 2024 with rapid additions: better search, topic tags, a chronological Following tab, trending topics, a fuller web client, polls.

ActivityPub — Big Capital Plugs into the Decentralised Protocol

A limited ActivityPub test began in December 2023 with a handful of Meta staff accounts. On 21 March 2024 Meta opened a fediverse sharing beta—ActivityPub is the open protocol behind Mastodon and the wider Fediverse—to public profiles of users aged 18 and over in the US, Canada and Japan. Opt-in global rollout (excluding the EU) followed in December 2024. In June 2025, Meta added a Fediverse feed allowing Threads users to search, follow, and read posts from Mastodon, WriteFreely, Bookwyrm, Flipboard, and other ActivityPub-speaking services from inside the app.

That made Threads, by a wide margin, the largest application on ActivityPub—an outcome simultaneously dreamed-of and feared by the decentralised-social camp. Mastodon had roughly ten million registered accounts but well under one million monthly actives; Threads is two to three orders of magnitude larger on the active measure. Some voices warned of an "embrace, extend, extinguish" pattern; others stressed that, finally, an open social protocol was operating at mainstream scale.

2025–2026 — Past 500 Million Monthly Actives

The growth curve after the crash was slow and real. Meta reported 320 million monthly actives in January 2025 and 350 million on the Q1 2025 earnings call in April; Zuckerberg announced 400 million monthly actives on 12 August 2025, two years after launch. On the Q3 2025 call Meta switched to the daily measure, reporting Threads had "recently passed 150 million daily actives". On the Q2 2026 call Zuckerberg said Threads had "crossed 500 million monthly actives, making it the fastest growing conversation app ever"—a company claim, and one that quietly re-labels the category from "Twitter killer" to "conversation app", but the scale is now audited financial-disclosure territory rather than launch-week hype.

Ads launched formally on Threads in 2025, sharing the Instagram ad system. On the Q2 2025 call Meta was blunt that "ad supply remains low and Threads is not expected to be a meaningful contributor to overall impression growth in the near-term"; a year later, in Q2 2026, it reported completing the global ads expansion on Threads.

Borrowed Graphs and Uneven Regulation

Threads demonstrated two things.

First, an existing platform's social graph is a weapon. What used to take years—zero to 100 million registrations—can be done in days if the new product can import its neighbour's graph with one button. What it does not buy is retention, as the following month showed. That capability is unique to companies with multiple consumer services (Meta with Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, Google with Gmail/YouTube) and raises real competition-policy questions.

Second, the geographic asymmetry of regulation. The same product launched in the US on 5 July and in the EU on 14 December. DMA, GDPR, and the DSA were doing visible work on product design and launch timing. The cliché that "regulation slows innovation" understates the actual phenomenon: regulation produces geographic differentiation of digital products, and that became, in the late 2020s, the baseline state of the social-platform world.

The partial migration of attention from X to Threads also left a recognisable pattern: the form popularised by Twitter—launched in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams—lived on, but its vessel split three ways. One person's private asset (X), a giant platform company's strategic product (Threads), and the decentralised protocols (Mastodon, Bluesky) now share the field.