The Threads logo displayed on a smartphone with the Twitter logo in the background. Threads is a new social network launched by Meta Platforms on July 5, 2023.
Omar Marks | Noor Photos | Getty Images
YuanOn Tuesday, Threads, a new text-based social media app, rolled out a highly anticipated new feature: a “Follow” tab.
The new tab allows users to view posts from people they follow in chronological order, rather than the less cohesive, algorithmically curated content found in the For You feed. Since Threads first launched earlier this month, many users have been asking Meta executives such as CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri about the feature.
“Ask and you’ll get it,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Tuesday.
Meta’s thread adds a chronological attention feed
The Threads update will also allow users to sort their “activity” feeds by follows, trackbacks and retweets, allow people to view posts they like in their settings, and translate certain posts that appear in different languages, Meta said Tuesday.
Many users were quick to point out that the “For You” and “Following” tabs look similar to the existing layout on Twitter, which is being rebranded as “X” as part of the platform’s latest changes since Elon Musk bought it late last year.
But the comparison doesn’t stop there. Threads has a strikingly similar look and feel to Twitter, as many of Twitter’s core icons and features, such as character limits, have been replicated on the platform. Meta execs like Mosseri touted Threads as a more positive “public square” for communities that “never really embraced Twitter.”
Threads first launched on July 5, at a time when a series of outages and a controversial rate-limiting policy were affecting Twitter users. The platform’s user numbers quickly climbed to 100 million, but engagement on the app has since tapered off.
Meta said Tuesday that it is working to deliver the new functionality to Threads as quickly as possible.
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