Something big shifted in the text-social market, and it happened on two fronts at once.
Two numbers landed in close succession: one racing upward, one sliding down, and together they drew the clearest picture yet of where the battle for the post-Twitter internet is heading.
A milestone two years in the making just landed
Just over two years since its launch as a competitor to Twitter, Meta’s Threads topped 400 million monthly active users, with Instagram head Adam Mosseri making the announcement.
That is not a small jump.
The new milestone means that Threads was able to add 50 million monthly users in the past quarter, as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had announced in the last week of April that the platform had reached more than 350 million monthly active users.
Threads has added 200 million monthly active users since Q3 2024. As of the third quarter of 2025, Meta’s Threads had approximately 400 million monthly active users, up from 200 million MAU in the third quarter of 2024.
The rival platform is moving in exactly the opposite direction
While Threads was printing that headline number, its closest competitor was heading the other way.
In June 2025, Threads’ mobile app for iOS and Android saw 115.1 million daily active users, marking a 127.8 percent increase compared to the previous year.
On the other hand, X reached 132 million daily active users, reflecting a 15.2 percent year-over-year decline.
That gap of roughly 17 million daily mobile users, which once looked like a chasm, was closing in weeks rather than years.
X had long managed to hold its lead over rivals, but the numbers no longer tell a story of triumph or growth. Instead, they reflect a platform losing ground to its core audience on mobile while failing to meaningfully expand.
The advertisers watching this race are doing the math
User counts are one thing. Ad dollars are another, and they follow engagement.
Threads is maintaining a steady growth rate, and Meta has also reported increases in time spent in the app as it continues to improve the Threads algorithm.
Meta opened Threads ads to global advertisers in April 2025, building on an initial testing period that began in the United States and Japan in January 2025, following its typical monetization playbook of testing ad formats and optimizing performance before ramping up supply.
For brands that had quietly stayed on a declining platform out of habit, the numbers now make that choice harder to defend. You can also see Meta’s broader appetite for reshaping the social conversation in how it has been redesigning Facebook’s feed at the same time.
The September tipping point that already happened, and what it means
Here is the reveal buried inside the data: Threads already passed X in daily mobile users, and it happened faster than almost anyone in the industry projected.
Threads surpassed X for the first time on Sept. 5, according to Similarweb, though the two competitors traded the lead since then. During the week of September 15 to September 21, Threads just edged out X in the average number of daily active users, according to Similarweb data, leading with 130.2 million daily users over X’s 130.1 million.
Meta says the surge in user activity is largely driven by AI-powered recommendation systems across its platforms.
X still holds a commanding lead in web traffic. Similarweb found that X’s worldwide daily web visits are well ahead of Threads, with the Elon Musk-owned social network seeing 145.8 million average daily web visits worldwide in June, while Threads had just 6.9 million.
But the mobile app is where most social users actually live, and every major text platform is now fighting harder for that daily open.
Since going private, X has stopped reporting concrete user data, and the figures it does share cannot be independently verified or audited.
Where the race goes from 400 million upward
When Meta launched Threads in 2023, Mark Zuckerberg has consistently described Threads as Meta’s potential “next big hit,” projecting the platform could reach 1 billion users within a few years.
At the current pace, that target looks less like a wish and more like a working projection.
Threads reached 400 million monthly active users in Q3 2025, having added 200 million monthly active users since Q3 2024, a clean doubling in twelve months.
While Threads and X continue to fight for supremacy in the post-Twitter race, Bluesky also continues to add users, reaching 40 million by early November 2025, though it has seemingly fallen out of the main race for a Twitter alternative.
The text-social market is not finished reshaping itself. But for the first time since Twitter was sold, one platform is growing fast enough on the metrics that matter most to make the outcome feel genuinely undecided no longer.
