Threads now has more than 175 million monthly active users nearly a year after its launch

Just under a year ago, on July 5, 2023, Meta officially launched Threads. The text-based social network was created to be a mostly text-based service to compete with X, then called Twitter. Today, just under a year after its launch, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on his own Threads account saying the service now has over 175 million monthly active users.

Threads was a pretty bare-bones social network at the time of its initial launch, but it slowly added more and more features. It first launched as an Android and iOS network but added a desktop version months later. Originally you had to have an Instagram account to also have a Threads account, but Meta later added a way for people to delete their Threads account without deleting their Instagram account. Earlier this year, a dedicated Threads app for Windows 10 and 11 was released by Meta.

TechCrunch reports that according to Meta, 63 percent of Threads posts are still text-only messages. However, the company does say that one in four Threads posts do contain at least one image. The story says that over 50 million Tags have been created in Threads. The top three tags are PhotographyThreads, BookThreads and GymThreads.

Threads was launched by Meta as a way to compete more directly with Twitter, which many people were unhappy with since Elon Musk acquired control of the company, and then decided to rename it X.

A day after Threads launched, the service that was called Twitter at the time sent a legal notice to Meta, claiming that the company had hired "dozens of former Twitter employees" and that Threads could be using trade secrets from Twitter. A threatened lawsuit from X has, at least so far, not come to pass.

Recently, Musk posted on X that his service now has 600 million monthly active users, and about half that number, or about 300 million users, accessed X every day.