Old Social Media Being Abandoned, Users Flock to Threads

Meta’s text-based social media platform, Threads, is increasingly showing its strength in the global social networking arena. While competitors like Bluesky and X (formerly Twitter) struggle to stem user decline, Threads has recorded highly significant performance growth. According to digital intelligence data from Similarweb for July 2026, Threads’ daily active users (DAU) soared 21.3% year-over-year (YoY) to 147 million users. Beyond mobile applications, traffic to the Threads website also leapt a fantastic 112% YoY, reaching 471.6 million visits in the same period. This performance jump for Threads occurs amid a slump for other text-based competitors, including the veteran player X. Bluesky, which briefly enjoyed a harvest of user migration from X following the US election in November 2024, has now lost momentum. Bluesky’s monthly active users (MAU) plummeted 27.2% YoY to 10.4 million in June 2026. That figure is down more than 52% compared to its peak in Q4 2024, which touched 22.2 million MAU. Similarly, Elon Musk’s giant X continues to record a downward trend. X’s daily active mobile users fell 7% YoY in July 2026 to 123.7 million users. Although X still leads in total monthly active user base at 302 million, Threads’ appeal is aggressively closing the gap. Data analysis indicates that Threads’ surge in popularity does not solely stem from an exodus of X users switching over, but rather from Meta’s success in attracting a new user segment that had never previously engaged with a Twitter-style text-based platform. Meanwhile, Bluesky’s new leader, Toni Schneider, is now shifting the company’s development focus from just the application towards a decentralised protocol ecosystem (AT Proto), along with the addition of private features and AI-based research tools. For now, however, Threads is the main player that has benefited the most and successfully dominated the macro social media market competition following the exodus of users from X.