And yet Threads pushed past that number in half the time.

Bluesky and Mastodon are still the fringe of human community.

Meta essentially forces every instagram user to install threads....so it's more forced growth than natural growth

That's because Blacksky and Threads address wildly different markets.

Blacksky's market is literally orders of magnitude smaller. That's quite a growth curve when adjusted for market size.

That's fine. The mainstream is a cesspool of shit and stupidity, and the rest of the world is welcome to drown in it.