Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta’s Q2 2026 earnings call that Threads had “crossed 500 million monthly actives”. Bluesky’s 2025 Transparency Report, published 29 January 2026, reports 41.41 million registered users at the end of 2025, growth of nearly 60% over the year.
Those two numbers are roughly 12x apart, and they are also not the same kind of number. One is monthly active users, the other is accounts ever registered. Comparing them directly overstates the gap in one direction and understates it in another.
The two figures
| Platform | Figure | Metric | Source and date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Threads | more than 500 million | monthly active users | Mark Zuckerberg, Meta Q2 2026 earnings call |
| Bluesky | 41.41 million | registered accounts | Bluesky 2025 Transparency Report, 29 January 2026 |
| Bluesky | about 25.94 million | registered accounts at end of 2024 | Bluesky 2025 Transparency Report |
Bluesky’s report also notes the count “includes accounts hosted on Bluesky’s infrastructure, as well as the thousands of Personal Data Servers operated by people across the federated AT Protocol network”, which is a scope definition worth knowing: it is a network count, not just a company count.
Neither company publishes the other’s metric. Bluesky does not release a monthly active user figure, and Meta does not release a registered-account figure for Threads. So there is no like-for-like comparison available, and any page that gives you one has constructed it.
Note: Figures here were verified against Meta’s Q2 2026 earnings call and Bluesky’s 2025 Transparency Report as of September 2026. Platforms change these without notice.
Why registrations always exceed active users
An account registered in November 2024 during a signup wave counts forever. A monthly active user has to open the app. On any platform with a spiky growth history, the registration number runs well ahead of the active one, and Bluesky’s growth has been unusually spiky.
The practical consequence: if you are choosing where to put effort, 41.41 million registered is an upper bound on Bluesky’s reachable audience, not an audience. Meanwhile 500 million monthly active is a floor for Threads in the sense that the registered number must be higher.
Threads had a large head start it did not earn
Threads launched attached to Instagram, which Zuckerberg said reached 2 billion daily active users in the same Q2 2026 call. A signup flow that reuses an existing Instagram account is a structurally different growth problem from one that asks people to create an account from nothing. Threads’ scale is real, and the comparison to a platform that had to build its user base independently is not apples to apples.
That also cuts the other way when you look at behaviour rather than headcount. Neither company publishes posts per user, session length or engagement rate for these apps, so nobody can tell you which platform’s audience is more active. If a page claims to, ask for the source.
What is not published for either
- Bluesky: no monthly or daily active users, no engagement rate, no advertising reach (there is no ads product).
- Threads: no daily active users, no registered accounts, no separate revenue line, no engagement benchmark in either of the large 2026 benchmark studies. Socialinsider’s 2026 report covers TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X; Rival IQ’s covers TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X and YouTube. Neither covers Threads or Bluesky.
That absence is the honest answer to “what is a good engagement rate on Threads”: there is no published benchmark. You would have to build your own baseline, which is the right approach on every platform anyway. The four ways to calculate a rate are worked through in what is a good engagement rate, and the engagement rate calculator will run them on your own numbers.
Context: where both sit in the wider market
DataReportal’s Digital 2026 mid-year update counts 5.79 billion social media user identities globally. Against that, Bluesky’s 41.41 million registered accounts is well under 1%, and Threads’ 500 million monthly actives is a genuinely large platform by any standard, though still far behind Instagram’s 3 billion monthly actives announced in September 2025.
For comparison against the platforms both are often measured against: X last published 229.0 million monetizable daily active users in Twitter’s Form 10-Q for Q1 2022 and has disclosed nothing since going private. So the most common framing, “is Bluesky catching X”, cannot currently be answered with data.
Note: Figures here were verified against DataReportal’s Digital 2026 mid-year update, Meta’s Q2 2026 disclosures and Twitter’s Q1 2022 Form 10-Q as of September 2026. Platforms change these without notice.
The short version
- Threads: more than 500 million monthly active users (Meta, Q2 2026).
- Bluesky: 41.41 million registered accounts at the end of 2025, up about 60% on the year (Bluesky, January 2026).
- The metrics are not comparable. Registrations are always higher than actives.
- Neither platform has a published engagement benchmark. Build your own baseline.
- X publishes nothing, so “Bluesky versus X” is currently unanswerable with real numbers.
Posting to both without doubling the work
The two platforms take near-identical short text posts, which is why cross-posting between them is common. BulkPublish publishes to Threads and Bluesky from the same queue, along with 13 other platforms, and keeps per-post metrics so you can build the baseline that no published benchmark provides. The character limits differ, and the details are in cross-post Threads to Bluesky.