When Elon Musk bought Twitter back in 2022, rebranded it to X, fired most of the staff, and significantly loosened moderation (leading to a reported increase in hate speech on the platform), it opened the door for new Twitter-like services, and Meta was one of the first to take it seriously with Threads.
The gamble appears to have paid off. On Tuesday, Meta announced that Threads now has 500 million monthly active users.
For context, X doesn't officially report the number of monthly active users it has, but estimates put it at around 560 million.
According to the company, one of the biggest growth drivers on Threads were Communities, which are groups of people engaging in conversations around certain topics. To celebrate the occasion, Meta said it's "graduating" Communities out of beta and launching several new features.
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The new features include a Communities Hub, which resides in the app's main menu and makes it easier to find new communities, as well as switch between them. Communities have also gotten distinct icons, which makes them easier to recognize. Community Progress is a visual cue on how a certain topic is close to becoming a Community (topics need to reach a certain critical mass in popularity and engagement to become Communities).
This topic is close to becoming a Community. Credit: Meta
Also, more people who frequently contribute to communities are getting the community champion status. Finally, Meta is launching local Communities, starting with native language tags in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.
Meta also launched another new feature, called Your Algo, allowing you to (privately) control which conversations you see in your feed. It's a complement to Dear Algo, which tells Threads what you want to see more or less of, but a little more granular, as you can choose whether you want this request to last one, three, or seven days (there's no permanent option, so you'll have to keep tuning this every now and then if you want it to stick).
Notably, Meta recently introduced similar algorithm controls in Instagram.
Your Algo is rolling out today in the U.S., Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.