The Threads app from Instagram hasn’t even been live for a week yet, and it’s already become the fastest-downloaded app in history — racking up more than 100 million users over its first five days. Building it on top of Instagram’s existing network of accounts, instead of forcing everyone who joins Threads to start from scratch, was clearly a masterstroke. Of course, it also doesn’t hurt that Threads launched at exactly the right moment. Dissatisfaction with Elon Musk’s Twitter, the app that Threads was launched in response to, is arguably at an all-time high.
All that said, the app is certainly far from perfect or even fully-formed. The Threads app has no hashtags yet, you can’t search for specific posts (only users), and tuning your feed is a bit wonky at the moment. Most of what I see every time I open the app is still a lot of random stuff that I don’t follow, sort of like a version of Twitter’s For You feed — but, at least for me, much more random and weirder, since the app has only had a few days at this point to figure out what we all might be interested in seeing.
“Threads reached 100 million sign ups over the weekend,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Threads post on Monday. “That’s mostly organic demand and we haven’t even turned on many promotions yet. Can’t believe it’s only been 5 days!”
As fast as Threads is growing, however, I still suspect there are many users out there struggling a bit with how to use the app. Finding interesting accounts to follow, for example, is a bit of a challenge — because, at least in my experience, the app seems to push a ton of influencers and otherwise random accounts at you to get you to follow them. Here, though, are a few that I recommend if you’re looking for good stuff to make your Threads feed a bit more entertaining:
- @bestofdyingtwitter (1.8k followers): What you’ll find here are memes, reposts, and saucy quips for all of you who think Elon is running Twitter into the ground. Like one of the account’s posts from over the weekend, sharing a graph of Twitter’s traffic tanking and giving it a Titan sub-themed caption (“96 hours of oxygen left”).
- @thehilarious.ted (217k followers): As its bio declares, this account is home to some of the best animal memes. ‘Nuff said.
- @pubity (2M followers): News and entertainment content, ranging from a jaw-dropping picture of two bullets that collided during World War I to a cute picture of two recently-widowed penguins comforting each other.
- @techemails (3.7k followers): Nothing but dishy tech industry emails that have wound up in the public domain, like an October 2022 email from a Twitter board member to Twitter’s general counsel, the body of which reads simply: “O My Freaking God.”
- @chartoftheday (22.5k followers): News junkies, this one’s for you. Managed by CNBC, this account gives you one interesting chart to peruse each day — like jobs report data and more.