Threads, Meta’s alternative to Twitter, just celebrated its first birthday. Since its launch on July 5th last year, the social network has amassed 175 million monthly active users. That’s a remarkable achievement. But a year later, Threads is trying to find its own voice, not being as newsy as Twitter/X or as open as Mastodon or Bluesky. At least for now.
Over the past year, the Threads team has been rolling out features at a rapid pace and gathering feedback about the social network directly from users. Since launch, Threads has gained support for multiple profiles, a web app, a TweetDeck-like interface on desktop, and in the US, custom controls for trending topics, muting, and quote replies.
The company has also made some progress in integrating with fediverse. Users can connect their accounts to the ActivityPub protocol and share posts with fediverse. Additionally, they can see likes and replies from the wider fediverse. However, they cannot yet follow people from other servers.
But there's a lot that Meta can learn from other social networks.
Next topic
Bluesky has done a great job of helping people discover a variety of content through custom feeds. Custom feeds are programmatic feeds that aim to bring in posts related to a single topic, rather than being limited to a single tag.
Threads implemented tags last year. But sometimes users share posts with different tags for events or trends. Is it WWDC, WWDC 2024, WWDC 24, Apple events? You can save your search terms and hope to get relevant and up-to-date posts, but there is no way to combine them. Some kind of provision for this in the API or a custom list implementation would be a big help.
Last month, Threads made its API widely available to developers, allowing toolmakers to post content for users and display their posts within their apps.
“The Threads API allows businesses to create and post content on behalf of individuals in Threads, making those posts visible only to the person who created them within their app,” Meta wrote in its description of the Threads API.
This prevents developers from building third-party apps to use Threads. Earlier this year, we wrote that social networks have become stingy with user data over the past few years. In the process, they’ve stopped developing alternative experiences that could help a diverse user base.
Threads' competitors, Bluesky and Mastodon, have created an ecosystem for third-party developers to create their own clients. It's unclear whether users will be able to choose other Mastodon clients to experience Threads once it is fully integrated with the fediverse. It would be nice to have some assurance that Threads is open to allowing third-party apps.
Separate threads and Instagram
Threads has built a large user base through its Instagram integration. However, with over 175 million active users, the company can afford to lose its relationship with Instagram. Initially, Threads profiles were completely linked to a user’s Instagram account. As a result, it was impossible to delete a Threads profile without deleting the Instagram account. The company later released an update that allowed users to deactivate or delete an account.
However, you still can't create a profile that's separate from your Instagram account. Plus, there's no way to DM people unless they go to Instagram.
But there’s hope in this area. In an interview with Platformer’s Casey Newton, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the company is considering moving in this direction.
“I would like Threads to become more independent over time. It’s still deeply integrated with Instagram. You can log in with the same account, you automatically follow the same accounts, and Instagram will show you Threads content. But I would like it to become more and more independent over time. We’re working on things like Threads-specific accounts and data separation,” Mosseri told Platformer.
News and Politics
Threads and Mosseri have taken the position that they do not actively promote or amplify news and political content on their platforms. Nevertheless, political topics do surface from time to time, such as trending topics. Currently, these topics are focused on US politics, but as they expand to other regions, there will be times when political content dominates social networks. And the company needs to hone its product in a way that can handle extreme situations without suppressing news.
X's community notes program isn't perfect, and it's prone to mistakes and biases. But it does occasionally provide useful context. Speaking of news, Mastodon recently rolled out a feature that displays the byline associated with the author's account on the social network.
“For You” Algorithm
Let’s face it, no social network has a perfect algorithm. Video platforms like TikTok may have moved the needle in a positive direction when it comes to providing interesting posts.
By comparison, Threads' “For You” feed can sometimes seem bizarre. Several people have written about strange posts appearing in their feed that are outside their area of interest.
I've seen posts lately where people ask “Where are you from?” and talk about how single life or dating is hard. I'm not sure what I did to cause this, but Threads really needs to work on making their “For You” algorithm more accepting when it comes to showing random posts on your timeline.
Better local content
To surface local content, Threads doesn’t have to look far beyond Instagram, which has developed partnership teams in various countries. Before Elon Musk acquired Twitter, it also had a partnership team focused on surfacing relevant content in various regions.
Threads has launched live scores for the NBA, MLS, and even Euro 2024. But it missed the opportunity to share live scores with cricket fans during the T20 World Cup last month. Earlier today, the company published a blog post saying, “India is one of the most active countries on Threads globally.”
There are areas for improvement, but given the feature release cycle, some of these areas may be addressed sooner rather than later. Threads has been friendly with Mastodon and hasn't really cared about Bluesky. But if you believe Mosseri, the ultimate goal is to beat Twitter.
