Threads takes on X with new communities feature

Instagram Threads, Meta’s X rival that now has over 400 million monthly active users, is officially launching a new feature that could redefine how its app is used: Communities. On Thursday, Meta said it’s introducing over 100 communities to the app, where users worldwide can have casual conversations around topics like basketball, television, K-pop, books, and more.

The idea, explains Meta, is to give users dedicated spaces within the app where they can delve deeper into conversations on topics that matter to them. The communities users have joined will display on their Threads profile, and each community has its own custom “Like” emoji available to members who engage with the discussions.

While the concept, on the surface, sounds similar to X’s Communities, there are key differences between the two implementations.

X’s Communities also offer a dedicated space for users to connect around a shared interest, but they’re designed more like Reddit, as the communities are created and moderated by X users. Community posts are also visible to other X users, but only those who have joined the community can participate in the discussion.

Meta, meanwhile, is responsible for creating the communities on its app; it doesn’t allow users to make their own. Plus, non-members can join in community discussions.

As on X, Threads’ community posts can appear to anyone on the social network — including within the For You and Following feeds. However, only those who have joined a Threads community can access its special privileges, which today include access to a custom “Like” emoji for engaging with posts.

For instance, the emoji in the NBA Threads community is a basketball, while Book Threads users can like a post with an emoji that’s a stack of books. Soon, active community builders will get their own profile badge.

Meta says it will also test improved ranking systems that highlight the best posts first, both within communities themselves and the For You feed more broadly.

The way Threads communities integrate with other parts of the app is somewhat different from X, too.

On Threads (as on X), when users join a community, others will see that you’re a member on the community’s public page. But on Threads, the community’s related topic tag is also added to your profile. There’s no way to hide this association, Meta told TechCrunch, because the feature is designed to let others on the app instantly know what you’re about.

Meta’s take on communities may ultimately work better than X’s, because it reflects how Threads users have already been using the social network. Shortly after its launch, Meta users organized themselves around Topic Tags — an evolution of the hashtag that drops the hash (“#”) symbol — with some tags, like NBA Threads, becoming more well-established communities of their own even before the introduction of the official feature.

Now those users can post directly to the community without having to remember to include the topic tag and can even reorder their feeds to make a favorite community’s feed the default.

In addition, users, for a long time, have added topics and hashtags to their social network profiles to signal to others what topics they’re interested in and might chat about.

Following user trends worked well for Twitter in its early days, where concepts like the hashtag, retweet, quote tweets, mentions, and more were developed by tracking user behavior, then formalizing those patterns into official features. Threads is now doing the same with communities, which could help it gain more traction. Already, Threads has been catching up to X in terms of daily actives on mobile devices, recent data indicates.

Meta says it’s initially testing communities across the most active interests it sees on Threads but will launch more in the future. Ahead of today’s beta test, the company had invited a small number of testers to try the feature, and Instagram head Adam Mosseri teased the feature over the past weekend.