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 competition. While competitors such as Bluesky and X (formerly Twitter) struggle to stem declining user numbers, Threads has recorded very significant performance growth.

According to Similarweb digital intelligence data for July 2026, Threads’ daily active users (DAU) surged 21.3% year-on-year (YoY) to 147 million users.

Not only in terms of mobile applications, traffic to the Threads website also soared fantastically by 112% YoY to 471.6 million visits in the same period.

This leap in Threads’ performance comes amid the sluggishness of other text-based competitors, including X, which is a long-standing player. Bluesky, which had enjoyed a ‘harvest’ period of X user migration following the US election in November 2024, is now losing momentum.

Bluesky’s monthly active users (MAU) fell 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 had reached 22.1 million MAU.

Similarly, Elon Musk’s giant X also continues to record a downward trend. X’s mobile daily active users fell 7% YoY in July 2026 to 123.7 million users. Although X still leads in terms of total monthly active user base at 302 million, Threads’ appeal continues to aggressively close the gap.

Data analysis shows that the surge in Threads’ popularity does not necessarily stem from an exodus of X users turning away, but rather Meta’s success in attracting a new user segment that had never previously touched a Twitter-style text-based platform.

Meanwhile, Bluesky’s new leader, Toni Schneider, is now beginning to shift the development focus from merely an application towards a decentralised protocol ecosystem (AT Proto) as well as the addition of private features and AI-based research tools.

For now, however, Threads is the main player that has benefited the most and has succeeded in dominating the macro social media market competition following the exodus of X users.