Threads reaches 500 million monthly users and reinforces its shift towards communities and algorithmic control

Meta has announced that Threads already reaches 500 million active users per montha figure with which the company wants to underline the consolidation of its alternative to X as a public space focused on conversation and communities. The data comes accompanied by a new batch of functions that reinforce precisely that approach, with changes in communities, greater visual customization and new tools to decide what appears in the feed.

The figure allows us to better measure the evolution of the service since its inception. When the platform debuted in 2023, Threads reached 5 million users in just four hours, taking advantage of Twitter’s moment of decline after the initial stage of Elon Musk. Since then, Meta has been expanding functions and, little by little, Threads has begun to separate itself from Instagram’s legacy product logic to build a more of its own ecosystem.

This process became especially visible in 2025, when Threads incorporated direct messages and continued to distance itself from Instagram. Now, with this new announcement, Meta once again insists on that more autonomous identity and links it directly to the growth of communities within the network.

Communities leave beta and gain more presence in the app

Meta explains that the communities feature has been one of the fastest growing since its launch last year. Therefore, now leave the beta phase behind and takes a more visible place within the core Threads experience. The company adds a Communities Hub to the main menu, located to the left of the feed, to make it easier to both locate and jump between different communities.

Along with this, communities receive own icons to better differentiate your visual identity within the platform. A progress system also appears that allows you to see when a topic is close to becoming a community and what actions can help make that happen. Meta also expands Community Champions recognition to more users and begins localizing communities in select markets using native Japanese, Korean, and Traditional Chinese tags in Taiwan.

The company also anticipates that in the coming weeks it will expand the Live Chats to more communities, including co-hosts and the ability to cite specific moments to the feed. That is to say, Threads tries to ensure that communities are not just static thematic groupings, but rather more active spaces, with their own participation and visibility tools.

Your Algo expands personal control over your feed

The other big block of the ad is in the personalization of the algorithm. At the beginning of the year, Meta introduced Dear Something as a way to tell the system what type of content you wanted to see more or less of. Now add Your Somethinga private feature that allows you to adjust which conversations appear in the feed and how long that preference is maintained.

With Your Algo, the user can indicate that they want to see more or less of certain topics and choose whether that setting lasts one, three or seven days. Meta emphasizes that these requests will only be visible to the user themselves and that Dear Algo and Your Algo will be integrated into the same unified control panel. Deployment begins in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

It is evident that Meta wants to present the platform as a space where the public conversation does not depend only on general trends or the weight of the algorithm, but also on a higher degree of personal adjustment. In other words, it is not limited to growing in users, but rather tries to reinforce the feeling of control over what is seen and how one participates within each community.