A new Communities feature has been introduced by Meta’s rapidly growing social media platform Threads, which is generally viewed as a direct challenge to Elon Musk’s X (previously Twitter).
As a competitor to Meta’s X with over 400 million monthly active users, it is formally introducing Communities, a new feature that has the potential to completely change how the app is utilised. The app will contain more than 100 groups, Meta announced the introduction on Thursday, where users from all around the world may engage in informal discussions about a variety of subjects, including books, K-pop, basketball, and television.
Similar to Facebook Groups or Reddit forums, but incorporated within Threads’ expanding ecosystem, the upgrade enables users to form and join interest-based groups where discussions can be more topic-focused and structured.
“The goal is to provide users with specific areas within the app where they can engage in more in-depth discussions on subjects that are important to them,” explains Meta. Users’ Threads profiles will show the communities they have joined, and each community has a unique “Like” emoji that participants can use to interact with the discussions.
The two implementations differ significantly, even if the idea seems similar to X’s Communities at first glance.
While X’s Communities provide a specific area for users to interact with one another over a common interest, they are more akin to Reddit in that X members build and regulate the communities. Only people who have joined the community can take part in the discussion, but other X users can see community posts as well.
Communities go beyond individual posts and timelines to provide users with a sense of community and increased participation.
Meta, on the other hand, is in charge of building the communities on its app; users are not permitted to create their own. Additionally, non-members are able to participate in community conversations.
Similar to X, anyone on the social network can see Threads’ community posts, including those in the For You and Following feeds. Its a unique features, such as the ability to use a custom “Like” emoji to interact with posts, are only available to individuals who have joined a Threads group.
In the NBA Threads community, for example, the emoji is a basketball, whereas in Book Threads, users can like a post with an emoji of a stack of books. Active community builders will soon receive a badge for their profile.
Meta also says it will explore new ranking algorithms that prioritise the best content in communities and the For You feed in general.
X and Threads communities also differ slightly in how people interact with other areas of the program.
Upon joining a community on Threads (similar to X), people will be able to see your membership on the public site of the community. However, on Threads, your profile additionally includes the relevant topic tag from the community. Since the tool is intended to rapidly inform other users of your activities, Meta informed TechCrunch that there is no way to conceal this association.
In the end, Meta’s approach to communities might be more effective than X’s since it takes into account how Threads members have been utilising the social network. Topic Tags, an extension of the hashtag that omits the hash (“#”) symbol, became the focal point of Meta users’ organisation shortly after its implementation. Some tags, such as NBA Threads, had already formed more reputable communities of their own before the official feature was introduced.
In addition to rearranging their feeds such that their favourite community’s feed is the default, those users can now post straight to the community without forgetting to include the topic tag.
To let others know what subjects they’re interested in and might discuss, users have also been adding themes and hashtags to their social media profiles for a while.
Twitter was successful in its early days because it tracked user behaviour and formalised those patterns into official features. This allowed for the development of concepts such as the hashtag, retweet, quote tweets, mentions, and more. Communities are now being used in the same way by Threads, which may help it become more popular. According to recent data, Threads has already begun to overtake X in terms of daily actives on mobile devices.
Though it plans to introduce more in the future, Meta says it is now testing communities across the most active interests it observes on Threads. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri teased the feature over the weekend, and the company asked a select group of testers to try it out before today’s beta test.
Given that Threads has already surpassed 200 million active users since its inception in mid-2023, the rollout also demonstrates Meta’s intention to continue growing the platform quickly. Communities might improve user engagement, increase retention, and bolster Threads’ fight for supremacy in the microblogging and real-time chat market.
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