Threads nears 100 million active users less than a week after launch

The platform achieved half of that growth in its first 24 hours, and is on track to overtake Tumblr in active users within the next few days.

Elon Musk has threatened to sue Meta over Threads for "unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property".

He later tweeted "competition is fine, cheating is not" on July 7.

Social media expert Meg Coffey said Threads' success was finally giving Twitter a run for its money.

"I think it's really interesting that for the first time in a long time we're all rooting for a product from [Mark] Zuckerberg," she said.

"How quick we are to forget that just last week we all hated him and everything that he stood for, but it appears we hate Musk more.

"It's fascinating that it's an Instagram product, not a Meta product. They are aware that Meta is on the nose and Instagram isn't."

Threads isn't the first to position itself as a Twitter alternative, with platforms such as Mastodon and Spill vying to topple Twitter since Mr Musk bought the network for $44 billion last year.

Ms Coffey said with the explosion of popularity Threads had seen, there was "not a chance" for these smaller brands to grow much further.

"Those other ones, Hive, Post, Artifact, they never replicated Twitter. Nothing will. Bluesky kept me going back but not enough because I couldn't find my people," she said.

"Immediately on Threads, I found the people I'd been missing on Twitter, my community were right there. Then when I went back to Twitter, I was like 'why am I actually here?"

The launch date has come at an opportune time for Meta, releasing shortly after Mr Musk faced backlash for limiting the number of tweets users could see, citing "extreme data scraping".

Ms Coffey said this timeliness was no coincidence.

"As Musk started to make changes to Twitter, they realised they had the opportunity," she said.

"I do believe it was the rate limiting that made them go 'yep, this is our chance,'."

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The platform has been flagged since the start of this year, first as 'Barcelona' then as 'Project 92' in June.

"Zuckerberg knows when to pick his moments, he did it with Instagram Stories," Ms Coffey said.

"I don't think Threads is the death knell of Twitter, but I do think Twitter is done."

Threads has had a sizeable leg-up thanks to its association with Meta and the ability to import followed accounts from Instagram. Ms Coffey said the platform still had a long way to go if it was to sustain this growth.

"There are problems, they've got to get the feed under control and they're obviously prioritising celebrities. They've got to fix it for the average user real quick or the average user isn't coming back," she said.

"It's got 100 million users but Google+ had 100 million users and did that sustain? No."