Meta said on Tuesday that Threads has reached 500 million monthly active users, and the social app is introducing a series of feature updates to mark the milestone.
The company attributed much of Threads' growth to Communities - topic-centered groups that enable users to gather around subjects ranging from books to basketball. Communities, which launched last year, have been singled out by the company as a key driver of the platform's expansion.
Communities moves out of beta
Threads is transitioning its Communities feature out of beta testing and delivering several tools intended to make group navigation and participation easier. Among the changes is a Communities Hub placed in the app's main menu to simplify moving between different groups. The update also adds custom icons so groups can be visually identified at a glance, and progress indicators to show when a topic is nearing the threshold to become a formal community.
The platform will broaden its community champions program to recognize additional active contributors. Threads also plans to introduce local communities that include native-language tags in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. In the coming weeks, Live Chats will be rolled out to more communities, with added co-hosting capabilities and the option to share moments from Live Chats to user feeds.
Your Algo and feed control
Meta is launching Your Algo, a feature that allows individual users to privately control aspects of their feed. With Your Algo, users can request to see more or less of particular topics for limited durations - specifically for one, three, or seven days. The company described Your Algo as complementary to Dear Algo, a feedback tool it introduced in February that lets users provide input to the algorithm.
Your Algo will be available starting Monday in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Both Dear Algo and Your Algo can be managed from a single location in the app, according to the company.
Ongoing updates
Meta said it will continue updating Threads based on user feedback, indicating an iterative approach to product development for the social platform.