Why Threads Seems To Be Stealing Major Ground Against Twitter, Mastodon and BlueSky

Twitter used to be the golden standard of short-post social networking.

However, lately, it seems that more and more people are sprinting away from the app.

There has been a rising voice for a new app to take the place of what has been described as the "Dumpster Fire" that Twitter has become.

Some people thought Mastodon or BlueSky would take the lead, however, progress for both of them has been extremely slow.

Within days of release, Threads (Meta's take on this industry) has come out with a huge bang!

Literally, in less than 24 hours they were able to 15x the combined audience of Mastodon and BlueSky, and now pose the first real threat to Twitter.

In less than 1 week, Threads has a user base that is (generously) over 25% of Twitter's user base (taking the highest estimates I've been able to find about Twitter's User base, lower estimates make it closer to 40%).

How is it that Threads seems to be on the fast track to pushing out the largest app in this market, while Mastodon and Bluesky have failed to create a noticeable threat, and Twitter seems to have completely stagnated (if not is now completely declining)?

Twitter's Challenges

There are a number of things that have led to Twitter being in this situation from a Leadership perspective.

The first is the Musk takeover in general.

Controversial Figure

Musk himself is a VERY controversial figure.

Some people love him, while others despise him.

Whenever someone like this takes over any organization, there will be some level of chaos - it's unavoidable.

The more controversial the Leader, the more chaos will ensue.

Musk is one of the most controversial individuals of our time, so a high level of chaos was to be expected.

However, that is not the only thing Twitter has going against it.

Broken Promises

In Musk's takeover, there were some promises made.

The largest of which is that the platform would be a "Free Speech" platform.

This right here is a losing promise, because no one agrees on what the phrase means!

Extremists took this and thought, "I can now say anything I want without consequence!"

Others saw that and said, "This is going to cause a lot of pain and suffering! That is unacceptable!"

Things got out of hand, and Twitter had to make an executive call as to how "Free" they would allow people to speak.

However, being forced to make that decision allowed people to question the Integrity of the Leadership.

"It seems they can't make the promises they said, how can we trust anything they say?"

This is what led to the creation of Mastodon.

Monetization Strategy - Misunderstanding Users' Values

Along with this, Twitter wanted to monetize the app as much as possible.

Here, they added charges for users and charges for gaining access to the data.

On adding charges for users, Twitter promised that by paying for membership your tweets would get a "fast pass" to getting seen by others.

However, this was flawed in two ways.

First, it didn't match what the larger user base wanted to be seeing.

The larger user base was looking for specific points of view that they wanted to hear, they weren't looking for the point of view of the highest bidders.

In fact, many people used Twitter specifically to AVOID that!

By misaligning with the values of the main user base, Twitter ended up disassociating with the reason they were on the map.

Ceiling On Benefits

The other flaw is that if "everyone" paid the price, then "no one" would gain a benefit.

We saw this play out.

Some people "paid-to-play" only to notice that they either got "no" better viewership or, in many cases, they got "worse" viewership!

Why would you pay if there's no true benefit?

This would leave Twitter with two options.

One would be being forced to create "higher" tiers, exacerbating the problem with the main user base, where only "the rich" were heard instead of real voices.

The other would be to get rid of the pay-to-play completely, which also would be the loss of one of Twitter's greatest revenues they've had.

Either way, it is a losing game where people get angry.

Difficulty In Getting Outside Content Shared

On the data side with Data being monetized, this meant that many of the institutions that utilized Twitter for research and connectivity with Twitter would be forced to stop due to ludicrous prices they were unable to pay.

Many simply were unable to play that game, so they left.

This also was painful for many users that used those companies to help distribute their content to Twitter (as I was doing myself), which just made it significantly more difficult to get content out.

Instead of earning significant amounts of revenue, Twitter just made things more difficult for a significant amount of the user base and lost more users.

No one wants to use something that makes their life more difficult.

When it's nearly impossible to share content that is important to your followers, why use the app at all?

All of these problems just opened the doors for new companies to attempt to take over.

Mastodon's Challenges

Mastodon arose from one particular thing that Twitter did - claim that they would allow Free Speech.

Double-Edged Sword

Mastodon promised that they would do what Twitter proved they couldn't - allow unrestricted Free Speech.

In a sense, this worked perfectly for Mastodon and allowed them to steal a sizable chunk of Twitter's users.

However, the same trouble with Twitter making this claim also applies to Mastodon.

If you fully allow "Free Speech", completely hands-off, you are inviting a lot of fully extremist personalities to say anything they want to, regardless of the potential damage it could have.

For people who were looking for that, it was a perfect solution.

However, this caused more fear than hope.

Mastodon's user base seems to have plateaued, indicating that they may have hit the limit of who is really seeking completely unrestricted "Free Speech".

The Problem Of Fear

People who fear being perceived as "extremists" are avoiding the platform completely, and only so many people truly want to hear the "extremist" opinions.

In general, when things cause Fear, it may have "some" success, but it will always be a fraction of the success that comes from Hope.

Mastodon's platform is currently handicapped by Fear which will hurt it from reaching the highest levels of success.

Fear of a "loss" of Free Speech.

Fear of bad perceptions.

Fear of painful things being said and promoted.

At least they seem to have kept their word and integrity about their promise though, unlike Twitter.

BlueSky's Challenges

Now, when people heard that Jack Dorsey (former CEO of Twitter) was releasing a competitor to Twitter, people got excited.

They were thinking, "Great! We'll be able to get back to what it was "originally" about!"

The Doorman

There was a huge desire from people to make that jump quickly.

However, they were met with a "waitlist".

Instead of finding the open platform that they wanted, they got stopped by a doorman.

This has made BlueSky feel more like an exclusive club with hidden rules of membership than an open platform.

The Perfection Gap

This is likely due to BlueSky still being "in development".

But herein lies the largest Leadership problem for the platform - they are missing the demand that is already there.

The people who "want" BlueSky honestly don't care if the product is finished or not, they just want to get away from Twitter at this point.

Threads is demonstrating this perfectly because there are aspects that DON'T work at all in the platform yet - including Hashtags!

Many people believe that Hashtags are the single most important way to spread information quickly, the cornerstone of social media, and Threads doesn't even have it!

People don't care if the product is perfect if the alternative is hated - 100 million people are proving that.

When the demand is there, don't hold back because something isn't "perfect"!

If BlueSky had opened the doors completely, people would have been forgiving of the problems and would have likely worked with the company to help find bugs and problems faster.

Instead, they are now losing a huge amount of people to Threads that were just waiting for the doors to open.

Bonus Secret Weapons Of Threads

There are other weapons that Threads has going for it that none of the other organizations have

Easy Connectivity

The biggest benefit, by and large, is how Threads is interconnected with Instagram, which is already connected with Facebook.

If you follow Apple, the interconnectivity between their products is one of the greatest boons to Apple's success.

Apple honestly doesn't have the best products on the market - they aren't the best phone makers, aren't the best computer makers, and surely aren't the leaders in music.

However, because their products are all intertwined, and it is hard to escape the "ecosystem".

So people keep buying from Apple, even if the products are mediocre and heavily overpriced.

We are seeing Meta tap into this concept as well.

Twitter's user base is less than 400 million - sizeable.

Instagram's user base is over 2.25 billion - a different ballgame.

Not only is Threads capitalizing on the failures of the other companies in the industry - they are also attracting new users from their own ecosystem.

Psychology And Biases

As more people "see" Threads on Instagram, they will join simply from a fear of missing out.

Mix that with all the people talking about how much they like Threads over Twitter already, you'll get a bias start to form that "if everyone says it's good, it must be!"

Even if it's not true!

That's just human Psychology 101.

All of these factors give Threads a huge advantage over the other platforms that may put them all out soon enough.