I think a big part of the initial explosive growth was due to ease of access. Almost everybody has an instagram account, and that made it really easy for people to just “check out” threads. I’m not surprised that a lot of people didn’t end up sticking around.
I think this is where the big numbers came from, yeah. That, and cleverly pushing up the launch date to practically the same day Elon limited access to Twitter, so everyone was looking for doomscroll methadone.
Not even just checking out, everyone with an Instagram account had a Threads account created or linked for them with no user input. This was done on purpose in order to boost their user count on launch. Probably 80% of people with a Threads account have never once opened the platform.