Meta's Threads celebrates 500 million users with a bunch of new features

There was a time when many Twitter alternatives popped up, and Meta couldn't resist throwing its hat in this game too, with Threads. Threads may have started as a way to capture people leaving Twitter after Elon Musk bought it, but it's now all grown up, it seems.

The service has reached 500 million monthly active users, having added about 100 million since last August. Undoubtedly, its ties with Instagram have made it easier to jump to than other Twitter wannabes. But Meta says the recently launched communities feature has been driving a lot of the growth.

To celebrate the milestone, communities is going out of beta. Threads is also adding distinct icons for each community, a Communities Hub in the main menu to the left of your feed, Community Progress to let you see when a topic is close to becoming a community and what you can do to help it go all the way, and more people will be awarded the community champion status. Furthermore, native-language community tags are now available for Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. In the coming weeks, Live Chats will be expanding to more communities, complete with the ability to quote moments to your feed.

A big new feature is Your Algo, a complement to the already available Dear Algo, which lets you tell the Threads algorithm what you want to see more and less of. Your Algo does the same for certain topics and lets you choose how long the request lasts. You can pick between one, three, and seven days. Only you will see your requests, and you can manage both Dear Algo and Your Algo in one unified hub. Your Algo is rolling out today in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

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