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

Threads will now let you share the custom feeds you’ve created, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday. This means other users can pin your custom feed to their homepage, giving them access to the same stream of curated content.

Threads first rolled out custom feeds in November, which you can use to track your favorite topics or accounts on the platform. This new sharing feature is now rolling out, so it may be a little while before you see it on your Threads app.

Your Threads feed will soon have ads. On Friday, Meta announced that it’s rolling out a “limited, early test of ads in Threads,” and the test will happen with a “handful of brands in the US and Japan,” according to Instagram boss Adam Mosseri.

Ads on Threads will appear as images between posts in your home feed. “As we learn from this test, we will monitor to see how it’s going before filling out more broadly,” Meta says.

Following last month’s test, Threads will now let everyone schedule posts, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced on Thursday. You can use the feature by creating a new post, selecting the three-dot menu in the top-left corner, and selecting “Schedule.”

Once you get your post timed up, you can view, delete, or edit it from your drafts folder. Threads will let you schedule your posts up to 75 days in advance, but it won’t allow you to schedule replies.

In what seems to be a battle between Threads and Bluesky for the hearts and minds of ex-Twitterers, Threads has been adding some interesting new features. The latest is the ability to share photos and videos without including the original post — in other words, without quote posting. (There’s a similar feature in X for videos.)

There has been some initial pushback on it. A photographer on Threads complained that “there will be a small watermark-like credit on the photo, but there won’t be a link back to your account.”

Threads is rolling out a new feature that lets you share someone’s photos and videos without including the original post. You’ll be able to add your own text alongside the reshared media, which will include a credit to the creator, according to Instagram head Adam Mosseri.

“This is a quick, easy way to add your creative takes to trending images and clips without quote posting,” Mosseri says. The original poster’s username will appear in the top left corner of the photo or video, with a repost counter in the lower left. Threads spokesperson Alec Booker tells The Verge that tapping on the username will show a list of posts using the media, with the original post appearing at the top.

Threads is about to begin testing the ability to schedule posts, according to Instagram’s Adam Mosseri. “Replies cannot be scheduled,” he added, explaining that “we want to balance giving people more control to plan their Threads posts while still encouraging real-time conversation.”

Mosseri also makes sure to note that Instagram has been working on this feature “for months.” I’m choosing to take as a sign that the Instagram chief is fed up with the notion that Bluesky is the motivating factor behind every new improvement that comes to Threads. Last week, Threads introduced curated collections of people to follow, which drew comparisons to Bluesky’s starter packs.

In a series of Threads posts this afternoon, Instagram head Adam Mosseri says users shouldn’t trust images they see online because AI is “clearly producing” content that’s easily mistaken for reality. Because of that, he says users should consider the source, and social platforms should help with that.

“Our role as internet platforms is to label content generated as AI as best we can,” Mosseri writes, but he admits “some content” will be missed by those labels. Because of that, platforms “must also provide context about who is sharing” so users can decide how much to trust their content.

Threads is rolling out a search update globally over the next few weeks that will let users filter searches to a specific profile and within date ranges. The existing search built into Threads has been a basic keyword search to find trending topics, posts, or accounts, with “Top” and “Recent” sorting options.

The updated version adds a settings icon to the search bar that, when tapped, brings up “After date,” “Before date,” and “From profile” options.

Meta’s Threads has accrued over 35 million signups so far in November and is “going on three months with more than a million signups a day,” Meta spokesperson Alec Booker told The Verge in an email today.

20 million of those signups have come since November 14th, as Axios notes. That’s on top of the 15 million that Instagram head Adam Mosseri said it had gathered in the two weeks prior.

Threads will now let users decide what feed they want as their default when opening the app. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the news in a post, saying that you’ll be able to choose between For You, Following, or any custom feed that you’ve set up. Zuckerberg’s post notes that Threads is “testing” this option and will also different feeds “more visible” in the app.

It took over a year to get here, but Threads is finally doing the obvious thing and allowing people to use the app however they prefer. Hopefully this test expands to all users before long.

Meta is promising “long-overdue improvements” to its X competitor, Threads, including more precise search features and expanded trending topics.

First, users will be able to search for posts within a specific date range or from a single account — similar to what X’s search allows. Threads is also testing a new trending page in the US that includes additional topics to follow as well as AI-generated summaries of what other users are talking about.

“We are rebalancing ranking to prioritize content from people you follow, which will mean less recommended content from accounts you don’t follow and more posts from the accounts you do starting today,” Threads boss Adam Mosseri announced on Thursday.

This is another significant change to Threads since many people started flocking to Bluesky. It lets people default to seeing their Following feed when they open the app and offers lots of customizability, including custom feeds. Threads just yesterday rolled out its take on custom feeds less than a week after it started testing them.

Just five days after Meta started testing custom feeds in Threads, the company is already rolling them out to everyone. With custom feeds, you can track topics and accounts in one feed, making it easier to keep an eye on specific things that matter to you.

To make a custom feed, search for a topic, then click on the three dots menu next to the search bar, and then click on the “Create new feed” option. Custom feeds can also contain information about multiple topics — just add a new one from a search or, on desktop, from the three dots menu next to a feed. You can add individual accounts to custom feeds, too, giving you a lot of flexibility on what’s contained in that feed.

Threads is testing a way to create custom feeds for certain profiles or topics, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Friday. The upcoming feature should make it easier to keep tabs on different interests, such as your favorite sports team or even technology-related news.

It sounds similar to the custom feeds feature Bluesky rolled out last year — but Threads’ version seems a lot simpler. To create a custom feed, just search and tap into a topic. From there, select the three-dot icon beside the search term and choose “create new feed.”

Bluesky might be on the rise, but Instagram and Threads boss Adam Mosseri wants you to know that Threads is still much bigger. In a post on Thursday, Mosseri said that Threads has gotten “more than 15 million signups in November alone,” seemingly trying to throw some cold water over Bluesky crossing 15 million users total on Wednesday.

Mosseri also reiterated that the platform has been getting more than a million signups per day — a stat that CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed during last month’s earnings call — and noted that the platform has been seeing that volume of signups for “going on three months.”

Meta could bring ads to Threads as soon as next year, according to a report from The Information. As part of its plan, Threads will reportedly allow a small number of advertisers to make and publish ads in January.

That tracks with what my colleague Alex Heath reported about the rollout of ads in July. Instagram head Adam Mosseri has also confirmed that Meta is “definitely” planning to bring ads to Threads. “I get why people have concerns, but at the end of the day we’re a business and Threads needs to make enough money to pay for the people and servers that it takes to run the service and provide it to people for free,” Mosseri said at the time.

Meta is adding an “activity status” to Threads so that you can see who’s actively online as you’re scrolling your feed. In a post, Threads boss Adam Mosseri pitches it as a “way to help you find others to engage with in real-time.” The activity status will show up next to your profile picture in the feed and on your profile, based on screenshots Mosseri shared.

Fortunately, if you don’t want people to know when you’re online, you don’t have to share that. “Only people who have activity status turned on will be able to see when you’re online, and you can turn this off within your settings at any time,” Mosseri says.

Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri is acknowledging recent mistakes in Meta’s moderation processes on Threads and Instagram. For example, Meta unexpectedly deleted my account this week because it thought I was underage, the company locked my colleague’s account because she joked about dying in a heatwave, and others have seen their posts disappear with no clear reason why. “Threads Moderation Failures” has been trending this week — putting more pressure on Meta’s moderation processes.

Now Mosseri admits that Meta is having problems with those processes and has publicly posted that acknowledgment on Threads. He explains there’s a “tool” that broke, which apparently did not show human reviewers “sufficient context” before they made posts and accounts disappear. You might think Meta is using AI to make decisions on what to delete and who to ban, but Mosseri’s suggesting that’s still done by humans and that the algorithm is just flagging posts for possible enforcement actions.