Instagram’s new Threads app has surpassed 100 million users, which means it reached the milestone faster than ChatGPT. OpenAI’s chatbot passed the mark after two months, but Threads, which only launched on Wednesday, got there in a matter of days. The number of users can be seen in the Instagram app, which tracks the size of the Threads userbase.
Users don’t just sign up: they also post. As of Thursday, my colleague Alex Heath reported that there have been over 95 million posts and 190 million likes shared on the app.
That said, Threads is still in its infancy, and we’ll have to wait and see if it gains the same cultural cachet that Twitter once did. Meta is not specifically targeting an attempt to replace Twitter, according to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, and the company will not actively promote politics and hard news on the platform, but it could be the place to go to people for a conversation- based social media platform. And while Meta “couldn’t be more psyched” about how the launch week went, “we don’t know if this thing is still here,” Mosseri said.
Update July 10th, 3:58AM ET: Updated to add data on Twitter user numbers.
