close
close

Mondor Festival

News with a Local Lens

As Bluesky Soars, Threads Rolls Out Personalized Feeds Globally
minsta

As Bluesky Soars, Threads Rolls Out Personalized Feeds Globally

While competitor X Bluesky takes off, in the lead 20 million usersMeta’s own Twitter-like app, Instagram Threads, has started rolling out a new feature called personalized feeds to its global audience. Hoping to capitalize on user demand for more personalization, Custom Feeds are intended to allow Threads users to easily create feeds around specific topics or including certain user profiles.

This would make it easier for Threads users to access the communities and conversations that are most important to them and could help challenge Bluesky’s set of personalization tools, including those that allow users to create their own algorithms, feeds and lists, as well as those that allow them to configure their own moderation tools.

The global launch of personalized feeds on Threads comes just days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. announcement the feature was under testing. This indicates that Threads is moving quickly to reverse some of the momentum Bluesky has seen recently. Since the US election, adoption of Bluesky has skyrocketed as users sought an alternative to the now more right-wing X, owned by Elon Musk. Other decisions at changed the blocking functionality and its policy around train AI models on user data.

As a result, Bluesky has significantly expanded its user base by approximately 7 million users just a few months ago, north of 20 million.

But Threads maintains the lead among its X competitors, with more than 275 million monthly users, largely thanks to its ability to relaunch its network by leveraging Instagram’s social graph and integrations with Meta’s other apps. However, some Threads users were disappointed by its decision not to prioritize politics and requested options other than the default algorithmic “For You” feed and the chronological “Next” feed.

This is where custom feeds come in.

To use this feature, you must first search and then tap a topic to see the latest posts. From there, you’ll tap the three-dot icon next to the search term and choose the “create new feed” option. You can also choose to add specific user profiles to a feed by visiting the user’s profile, tapping the three-dot icon above their profile picture, then tapping to add to one of your feeds.

Once feeds are created, they can be pinned to the top of the web threads home screen in the column-based view (similar to Twitter’s Tweetdeck or X Pro), making them easier to access.