GoKawiilis a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Threads has surpassed 500 million monthly active users, Meta announced on Tuesday, hitting the milestone just shy of the platform’s third birthday. Threads got off to a hot start in 2023, reaching 100 million users even faster than ChatGPT, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that he thinks Threads could hit 1 billion users.
Meta says that daily active users on Threads continue to “increase strongly across the globe,” with “all” of it driven by communities, which allow users to see and make posts about different topics. The company is bringing them out of beta and adding features like a communities hub in the Threads menu and giving communities their own “distinct visual identities.” Meta still greenlights which topics get a dedicated community — Threads said in December that the platform has more than 200 of them — but Threads boss Connor Hayes tells The Verge that letting users make communities could be something that is available “maybe in the next year.”
Threads is also introducing a new feature to give users more control over what their algorithm shows in their feed. Earlier this year, Threads launched “Dear Algo,” which lets you publicly share what you want to see more or less of, and on Tuesday, it’s launching “Your Algo,” which allows you to privately tell Threads what you’d like changed about your algorithm. Your Algo is starting to roll out in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.