Threads Launches New Communities Feature

Instagram Threads, Meta’s key competitor to the platform now called X, which boasts over 400 million monthly active users, is officially launching a major new feature designed to redefine how the app is used: Communities. On Thursday, Meta announced the introduction of over 100 communities to the app, allowing users globally to engage in casual conversations centered on popular subjects like basketball, K-pop, television, and books.

Meta explains that the primary goal is to provide users with dedicated, specific spaces within the application to delve into deeper discussions on topics they care about. The communities a user joins will be displayed publicly on their Threads profile. To encourage engagement, each community has its own unique, custom “Like” emoji, which is available only to its members. For example, the NBA community uses a basketball emoji, while Book Threads members can use an emoji of a stack of books. Soon, users who actively build and contribute to these communities will also receive their own profile badge.

Key Differences from X’s Implementation

While this concept might superficially resemble X’s Communities, there are significant differences in how the two features are implemented. X’s communities are structured more like Reddit, meaning they are created and moderated by X users. While community posts on X are visible to other users, only members can actually participate in the discussion.

Threads, on the other hand, puts Meta in charge of creating and managing all communities; users are not permitted to start their own. Furthermore, non-members can freely join in community discussions.

Just like on X, community posts on Threads can appear to anyone on the social network, including within the primary For You and Following feeds. However, only users who have formally joined a Threads community receive its special privileges, such as the unique “Like” emoji. When a user joins a community on Threads, that community’s related topic tag is automatically added to their profile—a public association that Meta does not allow users to hide, as the feature is intended to make a user’s interests instantly clear to others. Meta also mentioned it will test improved ranking systems to highlight the best posts, both within the communities themselves and in the main For You feed.

Formalizing User Behavior

Meta’s approach to communities may ultimately prove more successful than X’s because it formalizes a behavior already established by Threads users. Shortly after the app’s launch, users began organizing themselves around Topic Tags (a form of hashtag without the “#” symbol). Some of these tags, such as “NBA Threads,” had already evolved into well-established communities on their own, even before the official feature was introduced. Now, these users can post directly to the community without needing to remember to include the topic tag and can even set a favorite community’s feed as their default.

This strategy of observing and then formalizing user trends was a hallmark of Twitter’s early success, which led to the creation of official features like the hashtag, retweet, and mentions. Threads is following this pattern with communities, a move that could significantly boost its traction. Recent data already indicates that Threads has been gaining ground on X in terms of daily active mobile users. Meta stated that it is initially rolling out communities across the most active interests on the platform but plans to launch more in the future. Prior to this beta release, the company had invited a small number of people to test the feature, and Instagram head Adam Mosseri had teased its arrival over the preceding weekend.

Featured image credit: Tribu

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