Meta Says Threads Reached 500 Million Monthly Users

Meta announced Tuesday that its Threads platform has reached 500 million monthly active users, nearly three years after its launch as a direct rival to X. The company, led by Mark Zuckerberg, highlighted new tools meant to give users greater say over what appears in their feeds along with the expansion of its Communities feature out of beta testing.

The Your Algo option lets users privately instruct the platform on topics they want emphasized or reduced in their timeline. Choices can be set for one, three, or seven days at a time, and the requests remain visible only to the individual making them. This builds on an earlier public version called Dear Algo, which required users to post their preferences openly. The new private tool is now available in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

Meta said recent growth has come largely from Communities, dedicated spaces for discussions on subjects such as sports, entertainment, and books. A new Communities Hub will make these groups easier to discover, and each will carry its own distinct icons. The company noted that daily activity continues to rise globally, with particular strength in parts of Asia including South Korea and Japan.

Threads initially grew quickly by drawing on Instagram's existing user base and by promoting posts across Meta's other apps. Officials now claim more people are opening the app directly rather than arriving through cross-promotion. Still, the platform has not released updated daily active user figures since last fall.

The timing of these changes comes as users continue to compare Threads with X, where owner Elon Musk has emphasized reduced content moderation and algorithm transparency. Meta's approach, by contrast, keeps final decisions about visibility inside its own systems even as it offers temporary tweaks. Critics of large technology firms have long argued that such companies shape public conversation through opaque ranking systems that favor certain viewpoints.

Communities remain subject to Meta's approval for new topics, though the company has signaled interest in allowing users to create their own groups in the future. For now, the feature serves as a controlled environment within the larger app.

The 500 million monthly user milestone places Threads among the larger social platforms, though monthly figures tend to exceed daily engagement numbers. Meta has not detailed how many of those users return regularly or how much time they spend compared with competitors. The announcement focused instead on incremental features that address complaints about algorithmic rigidity without fundamentally altering the company's control over what content spreads.

As Threads marks this point in its development, questions remain about whether added user settings will meaningfully shift the balance of power between platform operators and the people who use them.