To be sure, the dream of a decentralized Twitter-like service has been around for years. History is littered with failed attempts—most notably App.net and Identi.ca. A real competitor never broke out because not enough people had a strong reason to leave Twitter, or a place to go if they did. Now they have both.
According to Similarweb, X’s traffic is down by nearly 20%, year over year. Another study, by Apptopia, found that the number of daily active users went from 141 million to 120 million. Meanwhile, decentralized services like Mastodon, Bluesky, and some Nostr clients have surged in popularity.
But it’s Threads, from Meta, that’s been the big winner. Meta disclosed in September that Threads already had nearly 100 million monthly users. (As of press time, Threads has not yet implemented ActivityPub, but it promises to do so.) Nerd favorite Mastodon is a distant second at 1.5 million active users but is growing, while the still invite-only Bluesky, which runs on the AT Protocol, is at 2 million.
And of course, the real Twitter killer? That’s Elon Musk.
