Threads reaches 500 million MAUs and adds feed controls

Threads has reached 500 million monthly active users, Meta said Tuesday, as the company adds new feed controls and community tools aimed at giving the app a stronger role in real-time conversation.

The headline feature, Your Algo, lets users tell Threads which topics they want to see more or less of in their feeds. Users can set each request for one, three, or seven days, and Threads keeps those requests private. Meta plans to roll out the tool Tuesday in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand.

Your Algo builds on Dear Algo, a February feature that asked users to post public instructions to the recommendation system. The new version removes that public step and gives users a more direct control surface for short-term feed tuning.

Meta also moved Communities out of beta. Threads users can now find topic groups through a Communities Hub, and each community gets its own icon. Instagram head Connor Hayes told TechCrunch that users have a better experience when they find relevant groups fast.

Threads also plans to expand Live Chats to more communities. Users will gain co-hosting and quote-sharing tools, and Meta expects all communities to start Live Chats by July. The feature gives Threads a stronger second-screen use case during sports, TV, and cultural events.

The product work points at Meta’s larger strategy. X still has a stronger association with breaking news and live events, but Threads has spent the past year filling feature gaps with direct messages, desktop messaging, ghost posts, search, tags, and feed controls. Your Algo gives Threads a feature X does not offer in the same form: temporary, private steering of a recommendation system.

The user number also gives Meta a stronger market story. Threads reported 400 million MAUs in August 2025. The platform added 100 million MAUs in 10 months, a pace that keeps pressure on X and gives Meta more room to build ad products, creator tools, and community formats inside the app.

For Meta, Threads extends the Instagram social graph into text, public conversation, and live commentary. That matters because Meta can use existing identity, follows, and creator relationships to reduce the cold-start problem that hurts many social networks. A new user does not enter an empty app. Instagram gives Threads a built-in path to accounts, interests, and friends.

The risk sits in product balance. If Meta pushes Threads toward live news and events, users may expect speed, search depth, and source verification. If Meta pushes too hard on algorithmic feeds, users may lose the quiet feel that Hayes said some users value. Your Algo gives Meta a middle path: users can change the feed for a short period without rebuilding their whole interest graph.

Threads now has scale, a clearer community layer, and a more flexible feed. Meta still needs to prove that users come back for conversations that start on Threads, not only for posts that Instagram’s graph helps surface.