I spent some time on Threads to see how it was and it's a fucking cesspool of like-mongering and look at me oneupsmanship bullshit that was so fucking tiring to look at that I deleted the app after 4 days.
Well, it would best to compare apples to apples, there are 8M total Mastodon accounts to 108M Threads accounts.
For active users if we assume the same active ratio (probably not, but I couldn't find any data for Threads on that from a 1 minute search), then it would be 2 million to 27 million, which is small but it wouldn't "completely" drown out Mastodon.
And our communities will remain strong. The people growing and caring for a free and open Internet will always be here as the minority to large corporations and lowest common denominators of society.
I believe it was the official mastodon blog that compared Meta advising xmpp the way they'll abuse the fediverse but we will stand strong.
Threads created a shadow account for every user on Instagram, so, I dunno. I'm guessing most of those are just dummy accounts that will remain forever inactive.
That number obviously doesn't include those, because Instagram has over 2 BILLION users. It's also easy to see how Threads can quickly get to 100M when that means you just have to convince 5% of your users to try your new platform that they don't even have to sign up for.
Again, that's billion with a B. Instagram is unfathomably huge. They only needed 0.1% of their users to rival all of Mastodon.
If i remember correctly, Threads just uses your pre-existing Instagram account so 108 million is a veeeery theoretical number. We will see how many users actually move to Threads and whether our instances don't block Threads instances.
You still need to sign up to/log into Threads (via Instagram) to have a Threads account or be active on there though, so what makes it theoretical? If they counted all Instagram accounts as Threads accounts it'd instantly be in the billions surely.
According to some users, Threads made a bunch of bot accounts to reach 108 million users. However i don't have proof, nor do i know why it's 108 million bots (or copied profiles) instead of around 2 billions.