Threads Reaches 500 Million Users, Rolls Out New Features

Less than three years after the initial rollout, Meta Platforms’ Threads has reached 500 million monthly active users. It is a significant milestone for the platform as it moves to deepen engagement through new community tools and personalized feed controls.

The social media giant stated that the growth has been driven largely by communities, which are groups of users sharing interests spanning books, basketball, parenting, and music. To mark the milestone, Meta is graduating its communities feature out of beta and launching a series of updates aimed at making those groups more visible and easier to navigate. The communities hub is being added to the main menu to the left of the feed, making it easier for users to find and switch between groups.

Communities will also get their own distinct icons to make them more recognisable across the platform, alongside a progress indicator showing users how close a topic is to achieving full community status and what they can do to help it get there. Champion recognition is being expanded to more users across communities, with local communities launching in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan with native-language tags. Meta stated that Live Chats will expand to more communities in the coming weeks, with co-hosting and the ability to quote moments directly to a user’s feed.

Alongside the community updates, Meta is introducing Your Algo, a new personal feed setting which builds on the Dear Algo feature launched in February. While Dear Algo allowed users to tell the Threads algorithm what they wanted to see more or less of, Your Algo adds a private layer of control, letting users filter specific topics from their feed and set how long a request lasts across one, three, or seven days. Both tools will be manageable from a single hub. Your Algo rolled out in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.