There's been a lot of talk on Threads about a “mass exodus” from X. Anecdotally, at least, new users and other online friends are flocking from Elon Musk's X to Meta's Threads, some deactivating their X accounts in the process. But while this chatter and various hashtag trends like “Xodus” and “TwitterExodus” have filled users' timelines, revealing a mass migration of users from X to Threads over the past week, app store and website traffic data has yet to reflect any major shifts between the two platforms.
Threads, Meta's Twitter-esque, less politically charged version of the social network, has been growing steadily since its global debut in July 2023. Earlier this month, the company announced another milestone for the text-centric platform: monthly active users have topped 200 million, up from 150 million in April 2024.
This week, the thread has seen several lively discussions about so-called X withdrawals, with hundreds of replies, where people have mentioned timelines being filled with posts from people who have recently left X for good.
“It's been like a tsunami,” Thread user @wanderscotwild_art said in a reply to the discussion about the departure. “This week feels like a tipping point,” another, @gazzaloz, said. Many other users reported that they too had moved from Twitter/X to Thread, or seen a significant increase in followers.
The departure from the social network formerly known as Twitter follows X owner Elon Musk's recent decision to weigh in on British politics, including re-sharing fake news about British rioters being sent to concentration camps and comments suggesting a British civil war is “inevitable,” which drew much criticism. And this may indeed have been the final straw for those who recently switched from X to Threads.
But when we dug into the data to determine just how big the churn everyone's talking about for Threads really was, we were curiously underwhelmed. In fact, multiple sources reported that Threads had seen very little change in its number of active users or app downloads, and in some cases even reported a slight increase in X.
One such source, app information provider Sensor Tower, estimated that X's average global daily active users will grow 2% from July to August 2024, while Thread's global daily active users will remain “roughly flat.” The company noted that global app installs for both X and Thread were also unchanged in August compared to July.
In the US specifically, X and Threads have seen their daily active users grow by 2% and 3% respectively over the past month. A possible sign of change is that X's average daily app downloads in the US in August were down 13% compared to July, while Threads was up 14% (though this doesn't explain the “X exodus” originating from the UK).
Website traffic provider Similarweb also took a closer look at X and Threads data following speculation of politically-related changes. But it, too, found no evidence of such a shift. Both X and Threads have seen daily and weekly engagement fluctuations across the web and mobile apps that are within normal limits, the company told TechCrunch. It also found that as of the beginning of this week, X.com's website traffic was up 1.4% week over week, while Threads' traffic was down 1.5%.
However, keep in mind that Similarweb may not be able to see trends that have occurred over the past two days.
Appfigures, another app information provider, has also found no evidence of an “X leak” so far, telling TechCrunch that it hadn't seen “any significant changes or upward trends” when comparing its data from last Friday with today's.
These third-party estimates may lag behind actual changes in user engagement (which may be reflected in later data), but it's also possible that more people are just talking about how they recently quit X on Threads because other people are doing it. Threads' algorithms may have highlighted these “quitting Twitter/X” posts in the app's “For You” feed because of engagement around the topic, making small changes feel much bigger and more impactful than they actually are.
It's also possible that people who already had Threads accounts and downloaded the app decided to return after a period of time away and became part of the dropouts, though their actions wouldn't be reflected in the app's install data.
Meta did not disclose any recent metrics, pointing only to the 200 million monthly active users mentioned in the company's recent earnings call.
Of course, Threads isn't the only app garnering the attention of ex-Twitter users these days: X also faces competition from decentralized networks like Mastodon and Nostr, as well as startups like Bluesky, Spoutible, and Spill.