Threads Is Working On A Chronological Feed
Threads, Meta's newly-released companion app to Instagram, is already doing some impressive numbers — and drawing the ire of Twitter owner Elon Musk for allegedly duping his site's design. Much like other major social media platforms, Threads utilizes a feed of content pulled by the platform's algorithm, including both recent posts from accounts that you've followed, and posts that have been determined to be similar or relevant to your interests depending on what you've previously interacted with. While it's an industry-standard format, it is a bit of a messy one, but apparently, it won't be the only available feed forever.
Yesterday, former Twitter head Jack Dorsey and Musk made a series of tweets on the platform related to Threads. A Twitter engineer named @enriquebrgn wrote, "No following tab on Threads? Uninstalled." Dorsey and Musk followed up and replied to the tweet criticizing the lack of a chronological feed. "Not surprising they've never given people the choice to remove the algorithm," Dorsey said. "Look at Instagram." Musk chimed in after him, claiming that a home feed with content determined solely by an algorithm means "manipulation" of that feed would be easy on Instagram's part.
In response to these comments, Instagram head Adam Mosseri posted on Threads, "If anyone was asking, both Instagram and Facebook have chronological feeds options, so yes, we're going to bring one to Threads too."
More features to come to Threads
As Mosseri said in his Threads post, both of Meta's other major social platforms offer both the traditional, algorithm-based feed, and a separate feed that shows new content from followed accounts and relevant hashtags in chronological order — a feature not included with Threads at launch.
Since the launch of Threads on Thursday, both Mosseri and Meta head Mark Zuckerberg have been both thanking the over 30 million users that have already joined the platform, and promising more requested features in the near-future. The two spent much of Thursday responding directly to feature requests on Threads, promising the eventual implementation of a followed-only feed, post editing, auto-translation, and account swapping. As of now, we do not know exactly when any of these features will be implemented. Zuckerberg and Mosseri have merely said that the requested features are "on the list" without providing any further information.
Meanwhile, Musk has threatened legal action against Meta for Threads' similarities to Twitter's format, claiming that Meta has "misappropriated" Twitter's trade secrets and intellectual property. Musk has even gone as far as to accuse Meta of directly scraping Twitter user and site data in the creation of Threads, though Meta has denied these claims.