Meta rolls out new Threads community tools as platform tops 500 million monthly users

Meta Platforms said Threads has reached 500 million monthly active users, a milestone it is marking with new tools aimed at strengthening “communities,” the groups of people that gather around shared interests and conversations on the app.

In a post on Meta’s Newsroom, the company linked the growth of Threads to communities, describing them as groups that form around topics ranging from books and basketball to parenting and music. Meta said communities have been one of the fastest-growing Threads features since it launched last year.

Meta’s update includes a set of changes to its communities product. It said communities are being moved out of beta, and it is delivering “some of the most-requested features” as it invests further in the people and communities that drove adoption.

For the weeks ahead, Meta said it will expand Live Chats to more communities, adding co-hosting and a way to “quote moments” to a user’s feed. The company framed the expansion as part of making community conversations more dynamic and visible beyond the group itself.

Meta also announced new feed personalization controls that build on earlier work. Earlier this year, it introduced “Dear Algo,” a feature that lets users tell Threads what they want to see more of, or less of, in their feed.

Now, Meta is rolling out “Your Algo,” described as a complement to Dear Algo that lets users privately control what conversations appear in their feed. With Your Algo, users can specify whether they want to see more or less of certain topics and choose how long the preference lasts, either for one day, three days, or seven days.

Meta said only the user will be able to see their requests, and it allows users to manage both Dear Algo and Your Algo in a unified hub. The company said Your Algo is rolling out starting June 16 in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

The update reflects how Meta has been trying to differentiate Threads in a crowded social market by tying discovery and engagement to topic-driven group activity, rather than relying solely on algorithmic recommendations among individual posts.

For Meta, the message is also an operational one. Bringing communities out of beta and expanding Live Chats indicates that it is moving from experimentation to scaling formats that keep users inside a narrower conversational context, which can improve retention and time spent when paired with feed controls like Your Algo.

What Meta did not disclose in its announcement is how much of the 500 million monthly user figure comes directly from communities engagement, or whether any specific metrics tied to communities, Live Chats, Dear Algo, or Your Algo are trending up. The company also did not provide details on how Your Algo preferences interact with other ranking indicates in Threads’ feed, beyond the product controls described.

Looking ahead, Threads users in the rollout regions will likely be watching for two things: whether the Live Chats upgrades increase participation within communities, and whether the topic controls in Your Algo make feeds feel more predictable without unintended suppression of related conversations. Meta said it plans further updates based on user feedback. The next benchmark will be whether these changes translate into sustained engagement as Threads continues scaling its community-first approach.