It is a new year and 6 months after the launch of Threads. It seems like a good time to take a look at the landscape for the “short message socials”.
The Numbers
Given its huge Instragram base, Threads launched with 100 million active users immediately. I assumed this would drop off to a fraction of that after the initial flurry, and then build from there. That did not happen. During this 6 months, the number of monthly active users has remained around 100M, which suggests there are a lot of folks that really, really didn’t want to be on Twitter.
Twitter (Musk calls it another name, but it is going to live and die as Twitter as far as I am concerned) is a different story. Musk completed the purchase of Twitter in October 2022. A year later, Twitter active users had dropped 15%. That’s not really a big decline, considering everything Musk has done to try to kill Twitter. But he certainly succeeded in killing the advertising stream, which is down well over 50%. variety.com/…
The simple reality is that many small businesses and many crowdsource reporting ventures are highly dependent on Twitter, and can’t see a way to move, no matter how disgusting they find Musk and his digital sewer system. But here is a really depressing/mind-bending observation:
Twitter has about 340 million active Twitter users worldwide (www.statista.com/...). Musk has about 160 million followers (www.searchlogistics.com/...). Now, to be clear, the former number is active users and the latter number probably includes inactive accounts. Nonetheless, it seems likely that of the remaining active Twitter users, probably about ¼ of them follow Musk, which is csome combination of creepy and scary.
Then there is Mastodon. That system has just under 2 million active users. (techcrunch.com/...). That makes Mastodon a relatively small player. However, it is a vibrant community (or network of communities,) probably biased to the more technically inclined and less interested in celebrity and lifestyle stuff. But is it growing?
The ActivityPub Effect
This has always been the key question about the path forward for short message socials. Virtually all the other similar platforms are stand-alone. If you are on Twitter, you can only interact with Twitter users. If you are on Threads, you can only interact with Threads users. In contrast, Mastodon is made up of thousands of smallish servers worldwide. With Mastodon, there is no billionaire at the center calling all the shots. There is generally no advertising. And no algorithms designed to enrage you or to amplify whatever biases you might have
These Mastodon servers are all connected using a protocol called ActivityPub. This is the glue that allows you to follow anybody on any connected Mastodon server, reply to their posts, forward them, and anything else you would normally do if they were on your server directly.
But that still limits Mastodon users to interacting with a universe of 2 million other Mastodon users, which is a lot, but nothing like the 100 million Threads users or the 300+ million Twitter users. It definitely is an inhibitor to Mastodon growth. It is like buying an EV with no fast chargers anywhere for 200 miles. Great technology, but serious limitations.
Well, at the Threads launch, Meta promised to add support for ActivityPub at some future date. Many people probably assumed this was just lip service that would never actually happen. The news is that Threads with ActivityPub is definitely happening. (techcrunch.com/...) It is in an advanced state of testing now, and a few selected Threads users can already be followed by anybody on Mastodon. It seems highly likely that Threads and Mastodon will have a strong connection by the first anniversary of Threads.
What does that mean? Does Meta really care about the ~2 million active Mastodon users? Well, yes, they should. Some are very smart, well-informed people who really don’t want to live in a billionaire-controlled world. It will actually be a good thing for Meta to be able to offer access to the Mastodon population of users. And as a consequence, I could easily see 50 million active Twitter accounts migrate to Threads, leaving Twitter even more of a tribute to Musk and little else.
Likewise, this will also be good for Mastodon. Again, there are many people who would rather not have Zuckerberg running the message platform they call “home”. If they can hang out on a Mastodon server and still see any part of Threads they want to follow, that’s a win-win.
What About the Other Twitter Knock-offs?
Let’s start with the understanding that most of the others are also owned by individual billionaires who, given enough success and money, might prove to be just as horrible as Musk. So I really don’t wish any of them well. In my view, there is a certain equilibrium with Threads and Mastodon being connected but so philosophically different. I really don’t see that the world demands any more than that. Nonetheless, let’s see how some of the others are doing:
Bluesky. This is funded by Twitter mogul Jack Dorsey. That’s really all anybody needs to know. He would recreate Twitter if he could. They have about 2 million users, about the same as Mastodon. However, the big difference is that Bluesky is a commercial venture that needs to have a large critical mass of users to make the advertising work. And of course, if they ever get that critical mass, they will manipulate algorithms to maximize ad revenue. Mastodon has no built-in support for advertising at all. A particular instance could add that on their own, but it isn’t part of the Mastodon ethos. In other words, it is not at all obvious that Bluesky will ever reach a critical mass of users to make advertising work. 2 million users is a waste of time for advertisers. Bluesky is not committing to ActivityPub, and is instead pushing its own proprietary protocol. Good luck with that. I doubt Dorsey will ever get Zuckerberg to support the Bluesky protocol, so Bluesky will eventually have to adopt ActivityPub or die.
Post. This one is funded by the same VC group that helped finance Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. There was a lot of talk a year ago, but it seems pretty dead. Without the “network effect” these systems end up like Rupert Murdoch’s prized MySpace. I couldn’t find any estimates of active users. Same for Hive.
Truth Social. It is not a significant player outside the MAGA base. It is a Mastodon-based server, but isn’t connected to the Fediverse — and if it were, most other Mastodon servers would blacklist it anyway. However, I include it only to note that Trump’s user base grew by one user lately: Dark Brandon. (www.forbes.com/…)
Similar, but different. There are a bunch of others loosely grouped into these discussions, including Discourse, LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat, Tumblr and many others. But they are not direct competitors to Twitter. So I will leave it there.
The Big Picture?
IMHO, the state of play is that Twitter is, week-by-week, turning into a Musk cult site, but it will still be around a long time because it isn’t easy for established users with many followers to move. Threads has impressively maintained its start-up level of active users, despite many predictions to the contrary. Mastodon is stable and vibrant, but still relatively small. Mastodon should expect a nice boost once Meta fully activates ActivityPub.