Threads dethrones ChatGPT as fastest consumer app to 100 million

Threads by Instagram. Source: Supplied

"That's mostly organic demand, and we haven't even turned on many promotions yet," Mark Zuckerberg said in a Threads post announcing the milestone.

To OpenAI’s credit, though, ChatGPT did begin from scratch and didn’t have the Threads head start of leveraging the estimated 2.3 billion monthly active users from its parent app.

Meanwhile, main Threads competitor, Twitter, is hemorrhaging traffic as reported by a damning graph that Matthew Prince, CEO of internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare, shared on Twitter.

Twitter usage numbers overall are down from the 240 million monthly active users it officially stated when the company last shared public results in July 2022.

New CEO Linda Yaccarino was quick to boast about an uptick in tweet activity on the day of the Threads milestone, with Twitter owner Elon Musk responding about alleged historic time on screen metrics.

Musk calls his lawyers

The billionaire last week also threatened to file a lawsuit against Meta, accusing it of poaching former employees to create the Threads app in a series of deleted tweets.

Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro wrote in a letter released on Thursday, 6 July: “Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms (Meta') has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information.”

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Instagram boss Adam Mosseri dismissed these claims and has since responded only to enquiries about Threads features from users.

Threads still has no desktop functionality and visiting threads.net in a browser will bring app a QR code prompting users to download the mobile app.

Analysts estimate that usage would spike if Threads releases a desktop version, which could help the fledgling social media platform surpass its biggest competitor.