For many years I've kept a spreadsheet with a few metrics on my online life. I don't check metrics a ton, but I like to pop into them every month to just get an idea of how I'm doing. Some metrics in there are blog traffic, YouTube stats, side-project revenue, and yes, social media follower counts.

For a long time, the numbers generally aligned with what it felt like using those platforms, and with how much effort I put into each one. Mastodon had the most followers and most interactions, which made sense as I spent most of my time there. Meanwhile, Bluesky and Threads were quite a bit lower, as I didn't post much on either, lurking quite a bit on Bluesky and a little on Threads. I'm not growth-hacking and I lack any form of social media strategy, so my audience numbers were just slowly climbing on Mastodon and Bluesky and they were actually falling slowly on Threads.

March 2025

Then in March 2025 I was put on a list called Tech Threads, which appears to be getting shown to a lot of people, and my Threads follower counts have been skyrocketing since then. In the past 2 months, my follower count on Threads has skyrocketed from 1,136 all the way up to 4,694, technically making it my biggest social media audience ever on any social media platform.

And yet, it's a god damned ghost town over there for me. According to the insights page, I got 93 total interactions with people in all of April. 80 likes, 11 replies, and 2 reposts. Absolute best case scenario, 2% of the people who follow me liked literally anything I posted last month, and that number doesn't account for likes from random people who don't follow me or anyone liking more than one of my posts.

So while I technically have the biggest audience on Threads, it feels like there's literally no one there. Every single thing I cross-post to all 3 social apps gets the least engagement on Threads. Many posts would get zero likes, replies, or boosts, and just recently that's jumped to maybe 2-4 likes per post. No one replies.

In fact, I recently snapped this screenshot of my notifications, which I thought really summed up this whole situation quite well:

Over 2 days I got a ton of follows, but the literal only interaction of any sort was a like on one of my posts from someone on Mastodon. Incredible stuff.

Meanwhile on Mastodon

Quick glance at MastoMetrics shows I get about 50 interactions (likes, boosts, replies) on the average day on Mastodon, with a few spikes when I post something more notable. And these are not just likes from strangers, there are tons of replies and conversations that happen in a way I've literally never seen in my time on Threads.

Final thoughts

I'm sure this isn't everyone's experience, but it's absolutely been mine. It's also why I look at headlines about Threads getting to 350 million users with a bit of a raised eyebrow. I'm not saying I doubt the metric, I'm just not sure what sorts of users we're talking about. Where are these people, and why are they supposedly choosing to follow me, but who seem to have no interest in anything I post? To me, Threads feels like a place where nothing happens. It's 350 million users and nothing going on – a vast nothingness of a social network.