Today, Instagram Thread, a meta X-rival with over 400 million active users per month, is officially launching a new feature that allows you to redefine how your app is used. community. On Thursday, Meta said it was introducing more than 100 communities to the app. The app allows users from all over the world to have casual conversations on topics like basketball, TV, K-pop, books and more.
According to Meta, the idea is to provide dedicated space within the app. There you can dig deeper into conversations on topics that are important to them. The communities that users have participated in will be displayed in the thread profile, and each community has its own custom “likes” available to members involved in the discussion.
The concept sounds similar to the community of X on the surface, but there is a significant difference between the two implementations.
The X community provides dedicated space for users to connect around shared interests, but is designed like Reddit as communities are created and mitigated by X users. Community posts will also be visible to other X users, but only those who have joined the community can participate in the discussion.
Meta, on the other hand, is responsible for creating communities in the app. Users cannot make it themselves. Additionally, non-members can participate in community discussions.
Like X, the thread’s community posts are visible to anyone on the social network. However, only those who have joined the thread community can access special privileges. This includes access to custom “like” emojis to join in your posts today.
For example, emojis in the NBA thread community are basketball, but users of this thread can like to post emojis, which are books stacks. Soon, your active community builder will get your own profile badge.
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Meta says it will also test an improved ranking system that highlights the best posts first, both in both the community itself and for you, more widely fed.
The way the thread community integrates with other parts of the app is also slightly different from X.
In a thread (like X), when users join a community, others will see that you are a member of the community’s public page. However, threads also add related topic tags for the community to the profile. There’s no way to hide this connection, Meta told TechCrunch. This feature is designed to let others on the app instantly let you know what you’re doing.
Meta’s take on the community could ultimately work better than X. This is because it reflects how threaded users are already using social networks. Shortly after its launch, meta users took up topic tags, an evolution of hashtags that use several tags like NBA threads to drop hash (“#”) symbols, and became a more established community before introducing official features.
These users can now post directly to the community without forgetting to include topic tags, and even reorder the feed to make feeds in their favorite communities their defaults.
Additionally, users have long been adding topics and hashtags to their social network profiles to let others know what topics they are interested in and chat with.
In the early days when concepts such as hashtags, retweets, quote tweets, and mentions were developed by tracking user behavior and formalizing those patterns into official features, user trends worked well on Twitter. The threads are currently doing the same thing in the community. This helps you gain more traction. Already, the thread has been keeping up to X regarding daily active on mobile devices, recent data shows.
Meta says that initially tests the community through the most active interest seen in the thread, but will be released more in the future. Prior to today’s beta testing, the company invited a handful of testers to try out the features. Instagram head Adam Mosseri teased the feature last weekend.
