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Nearly two years after launching Threads, Meta is finally giving in to users on one of the most requested features for the service: direct messaging. The company is beginning to test a dedicated inbox for Threads, beginning with Hong Kong, Argentina and Thailand, Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a post on Threads.
Threads has had some messaging capabilities since last year, but the feature only allows users to send Threads posts to friends via their Instagram DMs. This is more than a little clunky as it requires switching back and forth between apps. It’s also been the source of some confusion — at least among my friends — because it allows you to send Threads posts to contacts on Instagram even when they don’t have a corresponding Threads account. For me, this means I sometimes send a post to a friend on Instagram only for them to tell me they can’t view it properly because they don’t use the app.
Needless to say, all this has been far from ideal. And, unsurprisingly, DMs have been a highly requested feature from Threads users. But Meta executives — and Instagram head Adam Mosseri in particular — have been inexplicably skeptical of the feature. Mosseri said last year that he wanted to “make the Instagram inbox work” for Threads rather than build out a separate messaging feature for the app.
That’s finally changing, though. Meta is beginning its initial tests of a Threads-specific inbox this week. The feature will only support 1:1 chats — at least for now — so it will still be much more limited than what’s available on Instagram or even X. It will also only be available in a couple of countries to start, though Meta says it plans to expand to more regions “soon.”
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