> It must be comforting for Meta to know that if they wanted to build a leading TikTok competitor or any other social network in the future they can easily do it.

They already did. It's called Reels.

reels is simply nowhere as addictive as Tiktok. Tiktok blows me away with how interesting/eclectic my feed is. Reels is like watching funniest home videos with Bob Saget by comparison.

I haven't used Tiktok in several years but I can tell you Reels is worryingly addictive to me.

The scaling aspect is indeed impressive but I have not seen anyone (exactly zero) that I want to follow on threads.

I want smart people and weird but interesting schizos, not my "friends" from Instagram and Facebook. I mostly like those friends but I know their opinions on most things already for example.

Also unless one is being particularly pedantic he already has the only tiktok competitor (Instagram reels).

Seriousy? They have higher daily active users than X??

I'm really surprised to hear that. I don't really use either but wow.

Of course Meta is doing everything to make Threads work, and Elon is doing everything to burn X to the ground, there's that :P But yes it is impressive.

They must have a very creative definition of "active user" because Zuckerberg gets 15-20k likes on his posts while I can scroll down X and find several posts a few hours old from random gimmick accounts with many times more. Taking that at face value to call Threads "the leader in its category" is comical.

Instagram shows posts from Threads in the feed. I accidentally click on these all the time.

It actually shows half of the post followed by …, making you think that by clicking it you’ll see the rest. But then you get taken to the App Store to download Threads.

That explains it, I'm not in that ecosystem but suspected it was something similar.

Likewise, I wouldn't be shocked if I'm counted as an daily active Instagram user, despite not having an account or using it directly. The "shorts" are embedded in FB and occasionally interesting.

Feels a bit misleading by FB

All things considered (Elon etc) I’d still be shocked if an advertiser was willing to spend >= on threads compared to X.

It'll be CPM ad spend or maybe even conversion based, so, they can put a budget up and it'll be up to the traffic for the spend.

It's the leader in its category based on DAUs - the standard metric.

And the audience on Threads is very different from X so engagement will not be all that comparable.

... Why would you expect Zuckerberg to get more likes than "random gimmick accounts", tho? Those, rather that rather boring billionaires, have traditionally been the major driver of engagement on Twitter, too.

Can we verify this independently?

I don’t know why people trust stats from any social media company without independent verification. Stats can be massaged and there are large incentives to do it.

We know that the former Twitter board certainly did this, for example.

It's the same social network on a different .com