The new data — comprehensive and definitive — should put to rest the countervailing narratives over Musk’s management of the app. Under his stewardship, X’s daily user base has declined from an estimated 140 million users to 121 million, with a widening gap between people who check the app daily vs. monthly. X’s remaining daily users are engaged similarly as before. But the pool is shrinking. Apptopia pulls its data from more than 100,000 apps on iOS and Android, along with publicly available sources.
So apparently it lost only 13% of daily users? Thats a smaller number than I thought. Still bad news for Twitter though.
On the other hand, it shows the power of content creators and niche communities. I used less Twitter but cannot delete it because it is literally how I connect with my niche community on there.
Threads was launched before it was finished to capitalise on one of Musk's more brain dead decisions - and the Threads website was initially almost unusable (it's still missing a lot of things - such as federation with Mastodon).
The requirement to use a phone app, if it still exists, wasn't nefarious, it was just the best they could do without delaying the product launch.
As for "the account they already apparently created"… AFAIK threads runs on Instagram's infrastructure. So if you have an Instagram account then, yeah, "signing up to threads" is basically just enabling threads on your existing account. If you don't have an Instagram account I'm pretty sure they create one when you sign up for Threads (but disable Instagram on your account unless you "sign up" over there).
I think Threads won't try to federate with Mastodon, since it's most likely to end up as a PR disaster. Half of the fediverse will de-federate with them from the outset, while the rest of them will have their fingers on the trigger. I don't think the fediverse has any tolerance for their BS after their (and Google's) rug pull on XMPP.