Instagram’s Threads: all the updates on the new Twitter competitor

Threads, Meta’s X competitor, is officially one year old. While the site was rushed into existence with a bare-bones set of features, Meta has steadily improved upon the app to make it a decent place for people looking to post on a platform that isn’t X. 

The site arrived at the right moment. By last summer, Elon Musk’s takeover of X — which back then was still called Twitter — hadn’t only seen him wantonly firing vast swaths of the company and shutting off servers but also making changes with real consequences for the site’s user experience. That site had been very unstable and major advertisers fled, leaving in their wake cheap, garbage product and crypto ads. Chaotic changes to verification led first to high-profile impersonations and celebrity suspensions and then to the spread of false information.

A year and a half ago, Threads was but a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.

Now, the rival to Elon Musk’s X has reached more than 175 million monthly active users, the Meta CEO announced on Wednesday.

Threads will now let people like and see replies to their Threads posts that appear on other federated social media platforms, the company announced on Tuesday.

Previously, if you made a post on Threads that was syndicated to another platform like Mastodon, you wouldn’t be able to see responses to that post while still inside Threads. That meant you’d have to bounce back and forth between the platforms to stay up-to-date on replies.

Threads is widely rolling out a desktop site redesign that lets you customize your homepage with a series of feeds, similar to TweetDeck. In a post on Threads, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced that it’s coming to all users globally starting today.

With the new layout, you can choose which feeds you want to see by selecting the pin icon in the bottom-left corner of the site. From there, you can display your Following feed, For You feed, saved posts, recent notifications, and more. You can scroll horizontally on your screen to see all of the feeds you’ve pinned. Or if you’re more of a minimalist, you can still display one single feed.

One important step of evolving Threads into a fully featured social media platform is being more transparent about reach and distribution. And today, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri says the company is making it easy for anyone to see a post’s view count. “It’s important that people understand how their Threads posts perform, so we’re rolling out the ability to tap anywhere on a post to display its total view count,” he writes.

As usual, it’ll take some time before everyone gets this option — I’m not seeing it in my app or on the web just yet — but it’ll be a welcome window into performance for influencers, businesses, and regular users. If nothing else, it’s always nice to know you’re not just shouting into the void. “We’ve got more work to do, but I think this is a great first step in giving creators the some of the data they’ve been asking for,” Mosseri added.

Just like Instagram, Threads will now automatically filter out potentially offensive words, phrases, or emoji by default. In a post on Thursday, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced that the new Hidden Words feature will apply to both your “Following” and “For You” feeds, along with search results, profiles, and replies to your posts.

If you want to cast a wider net over the content Threads filters out, you can add specific words, phrases, or emoji to hide by tweaking the option inside the app’s settings. Meta notes that you can turn Hidden Words on or off at any time. Instagram started letting users filter out abusive words from their comments in 2016 before extending the feature to DMs.

Threads is testing the option to automatically hide your old posts. Instagram head Adam Mosseri says the feature is only available to a “small number” of users for now, but it will let you choose to archive individual posts manually or have them automatically archived after a certain amount of time.

You can see an example of how the feature might look in Mosseri’s post on Threads. Users with access to the test should be able to manually archive their content by hitting the three dots in the top-right corner of a post and selecting “Archive now.” This will give users the option to hide certain posts on their profiles, similar to the archive option on Instagram.

The official US president Threads account, currently helmed by President Joe Biden, has begun using Meta’s ActivityPub integration, making Biden the first sitting US president to post on the decentralized networking protocol. If you want to follow the President’s posts, but don’t want to leave Mastodon, you can follow @potus@threads.net.

The account turning on fediverse posting comes only a couple of weeks after Threads rolled out its beta ActivityPub integration for users in the US, Canada, and Japan.

Threads is rolling out a beta of its fediverse integration in the US, Canada, and Japan. In a post on Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that toggling on the feature will let you cross-post and view likes from other federated platforms, like Mastodon.

Threads previewed its fediverse integration earlier this week during the FediForum. As outlined on its support page, Meta says that you must have a public account to turn on fediverse sharing, which will allow users on other servers to “search for and follow your profile, view your posts, interact with your content, and share your content to anyone on or off their server.”

Threads is coming to the fediverse — and we just got our first official look at how that might work from Meta itself. During the FediForum conference on Tuesday, Meta’s Peter Cottle showed off a brief demo of how users will eventually be able to connect their accounts and posts to the fediverse. The integration will let users share their posts across different platforms through Threads, letting them reach multiple audiences at once. Meta is just one of the many platforms aiming to join the fediverse, a group of decentralized social networks aiming to become interoperable with one another.

As you can see in the video below, which FediForum shared with The Verge, Cottle can navigate to his Threads account settings and toggle on an option called “fediverse sharing.” Meta will then show a pop-up explaining what exactly the fediverse is, along with some disclaimers Meta will flag to users so they know what they’re getting into.