Instagram’s Threads surpasses 100 million users

Instagram’s new Threads app has already surpassed 100 million users, meaning it reached the milestone dramatically faster than even ChatGPT. OpenAI’s chatbot passed the mark after two months, but Threads, which only launched on Wednesday, got there in a matter of days.

Users aren’t just signing up: they’re posting, too. As of Thursday, my colleague Alex Heath reported that there have already been more than 95 million posts and 190 million likes shared on the app.

That said, Threads is still in its infancy, and we’ll have to wait and see if it captures the same cultural cachet that Twitter once did. Meta isn’t specifically targeting trying to replace Twitter, according to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, and the company isn’t going to actively encourage politics and hard news on the platform, but it could end up being the place people go for a conversation-based social media platform. And while Meta “couldn’t be more psyched” about how the launch week has gone, “we don’t even know if this thing is retentive yet,” Mosseri said.