Just numbers being shuffled, since I see no meaningful difference between Musk's and Zuckerberg's platforms

X reached 132 million daily actives, as its year-over-year growth declined by 15.2%.

To talk about "growth" being in decline is weird. The user base is in decline. X is shrinking.

Also it's hard to get reliable stats on x/twitters use because Musk and Co try to obscure it as much as possible after damaging the company.

If you search online there are claims.It's still reaching 250million a day but that is also a decline from previous claims. Also there are plenty of claims about declining market penetration - for example from 45% in the UK in 2020 to just 10% now and falling.

So this story is probably more a mix of growth in Threads (which is also somewhat dubious) and a decline in X/Twitter.

What the heck is X?

Real life people use Threads !? I guess that speaks more to Twitter's decline than Threads' success that the numbers are getting close...

How’s Threads anyway? Once I heard they don’t allow you to simply delete your account, I noped out of it.

Not sure if it is true but apparently if you want to delete your account, it’ll also delete your Instagram account?

because it's mostly just influencers and brands.

Doesn't every Instagram user automatically have a Threads account now? (Even if they're unaware of it.)

Meta faking Threads user count that way on top of what's happened with X user count would explain this "milestone" quite easily.

Threads is weird, maybe because I'm not used to the Twitter-like format. Posting is fast like Lemmy (not surprising since it shares the Fediverse infrastructure). Replies are harder to read since it's one level nested. There's no downvotes.

Anyone can choose to tag any post or comment as any topic, like Twitter but hashtags don't appear to be needed. Images and gifs are well supported by default, but it doesn't support alt-text for accessibility.

The default feed is heavily bot-laden worth thirst-traps and AI women. You need to find actual people and follow them for recommendations for other real people to start to show up in the default feed which is a bit annoying. You end up with a social circle like in Facebook but they are complete strangers unless you accept recommendations from any Instagram contacts you know in real life. You need to turn off linking between Threads and Instagram (on both applications) if you want to keep them separate, it's opt-out.

Political discussions are toxic; this is unsurprising. Lots of MAGA trash, but not Nazi-laden like X (formerly Twitter). Arguments with them are unfruitful.

The meme game is incredibly weak compared to here (thanks PugJesus, The_Picard_Maneuver, cm0002, Stamets, LadyButterfly, Track_Shovel, etc.). Lemmy has an incredible amount of fantastic memes for it's size.

There are of course ads but they aren't as obnoxious as Facebook ads. No doubt Meta is data mining the hell out of your content.

Since there's millions of people (if they aren't conflating with Instagram users) it's incredibly active. That part is nice but you also get the stupidity and ignorance from Facebook-like users; this is where curating your follows is important.

Can you follow threads accounts from mastodon now? That would make mastodon so much more usable.

Wut