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Now that Threads has grown to more than 400 million users, Meta is adding more features that could help the platform establish an identity. The company is testing a new “communities” feature that creates dedicated spaces for people to chat about specific topics and interests.
Meta describes the feature as an evolution of its custom feeds and topic tags, with the goal of creating “casual spaces for you to share unique takes on topics like basketball or TV with other people who love them too.” The company has already created more than 100 communities around topics that already have large followings on the platform, like “NBA Threads,” “Book Threads” and “Tech Threads.”
Several users have already reported seeing the feature and joining these spaces over the last few days. (Meta says that “leading voices” in these communities will get to add blue badges to their profiles to showcase their involvement in the groups.)
For now, community feeds don’t look all that different from Threads’ topics feeds, but there are subtle differences. According to Meta, posts in communities will be ranked to surface more relevant posts higher up in the feed (the app’s current topic-based feeds tend to be more of a random jumble of posts from anyone who has tagged the topic). And, when you’re browsing a community’s feed, liking posts will trigger a custom emoji, like a basketball for the “NBA Threads” community.
Meta isn’t the first to try out the idea. Twitter created a communities feature back in 2021, and X said last year that the feature had seen a “495% jump” in “user active minutes.”Communities could also make Threads feel more cohesive. Since Threads’ algorithm so heavily emphasizes recommended posts from random, unconnected accounts, users have regularly complained about the app’s feed. Now, Meta says that the communities people join will also influence the content they see in their main feed, so joining more communities could also help tune its recommendations overall.
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