Global DAUs of Threads [NASDAQ: META] have declined every month for the past eight months. US DAUs of the app have declined for seven out of the past eight months. US DAUs are now off 61% from their October 2024 highs. Looking at MAUs, which are typically slower to deteriorate than DAUs, Threads had 400M globally in January 2026 which has dropped to 388M in April.
Threads launched in July 2023 and grew to have more US DAUs than X starting in Q1 2024, a superiority it held until September 2025. Since then, US DAUs of X have been flat to down but have not lost them at the rate of Threads. X grew DAUs 22% globally and 28% in the US, year-over-year in Q1 2026. Over the same time period, Threads was down 21% globally and 27% in the US.
What surprised me is that X is beating Threads in the three major granular engagement metrics: time spent per DAU, average sessions per DAU, and churn rate. If we isolate Power Users, those representing the top 10% of time spent in-app, X is still beating Threads in the aforementioned metrics. Where X struggles is its demographic split. Males make up ~75% of X’s active users, a number that’s been consistently growing since June 2023. Meanwhile males have consistently made up about 54% of Threads active users.
“What we might be watching is the text-social category consolidating back to a single app after two years of fragmentation,” said Tom Grant, VP of Research at Apptopia. “Threads peaked and Bluesky never converted its 2024 surge into lasting engagement. X is now winning on every engagement metric we track. The open question is whether X’s demographic narrowing eventually caps that advantage.”
Bluesky, briefly positioned in 2024 as the credible X alternative, has effectively collapsed as a competitive threat. US DAUs are down ~96% from January 2025, and the cross-app data shows users of Threads and X are using Bluesky less and less. Only 3% of X users now also use Bluesky, down from 7% in early 2025, while 62% of remaining Bluesky users open X each month, up from 57%.
