The reason Threads is failing is that, for whatever reason, they chose to launch without a desktop experience. I can't imagine how many users went to threads.net, clicked around for a few minutes while being extremely confused on how to sign up or access the product, then left permanently. No, I'm not going to download your mobile app, and most people won't either.
What % of users do you think care about a desktop experience? I expect the vast majority of users would be mobile-only. I'm sure you can find relevant statistics about Twitters desktop vs mobile usage.
"Users" yes, but that's not why Twitter was "big" (in quotes because, by user base, Twitter wasn't big at all).
Twitter's cultural cachet was because you could link and embed Tweets. Whatever platform you're on, viewing things on Twitter "just works" if you have a URL. That means journalists can point to things on Twitter, post things on Twitter, and the normal mechanisms of internet virality mean they can spread through basically any medium (i.e. how many times are Twitter links shown on other platforms?)
It's also worth noting that "influencer" types don't - or didn't - use Twitter directly. They used various bits of API management software to curate their appearance.
Threads has none of that: without a web browser experience, you can't share and link things on Threads in other mediums. There's no possibility of embedded Threads posts being a thing. And that means, fundamentally, Threads can never actually pull sign-ups by organic virality - or pull views from it either. It's notable the big sign up wave happened right as it looked like Twitter was going to block viewing Tweets for users without an account - that was (correctly) interpreted as the final nail in the coffin (and was rolled back).
That data is biased by the small minority of super active users who spend 4-5 hours/day on Twitter.
The relevant number would be to condition on only the 20th to 80th percentile users (by time spent/day) and see their breakdown. I am going to bet that number is more biased towards desktop, while both the 0-20% (occasional users) and 80-100% percentiles will be mobile focused.
The other confounding effect is the bots and the pseudo-bots (humans operating many accounts). I don't know how they change these numbers.
I don't know a single person who willingly prefers a limited, bogged-down experience of any product (social media or otherwise) over a full-fledged desktop client.
Of course I prefer doing all of my computing on my desktop computer. But I don't take my desktop computer with me to the grocery store. And I use Twitter to entertain myself when I'm waiting in line at the grocery store, for example. When I am at my desktop computer, I'm much less likely to be interested in using Twitter.
That said, one of many reasons I didn't bother creating a Threads account is precisely that reason: no desktop client. Unless forced, I won't use anything that is exclusively available on mobile devices.
I have mod rights on a general subreddit (a city), and I see that mobile is consistently 75-80% of the traffic. That seems consistent with the numbers above.
I know I gave up on it anyway without desktop. But what I really gave up on was lack of discovery on how to get my twitter network replicated. I was at least able to do that with Mastodon for all its UX sins.
You do realize that even after the initial drop (which is expected, for something that managed to get so much hype) they’re likely still the biggest app in the history in terms of DAU in few weeks after the lunch?
