Meta Says Threads Reached 500 Million Monthly Users

Meta’s Threads platform has reached 500 million monthly active users, a milestone the company announced Tuesday just shy of the app’s third anniversary. The growth comes as Threads introduces features designed to give users more direct influence over what appears in their feeds and to strengthen dedicated discussion spaces around specific topics.

The new “Your Algo” tool allows users to privately request adjustments to their algorithmic feed, specifying topics they want to see more or less of for periods of one, three, or seven days. It builds on the earlier “Dear Algo” feature, which required those requests to be posted publicly. The update is rolling out first in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. By keeping the instructions private, Threads is offering a form of personalization that competing platforms have not matched, even as users across social media continue to express frustration with opaque recommendation systems.

Communities, which Threads first tested last year, are now leaving beta. The feature creates topic-focused spaces for conversations on subjects such as sports, entertainment, and books. Meta is adding a Communities Hub for easier discovery and giving each group its own distinct icon. Company executives have credited these spaces with driving recent engagement, noting that daily active users continue to rise globally and that nearly all of the measured growth is tied to community activity. The company has so far approved more than 200 communities itself; it has signaled that user-created groups could arrive within the next year.

The 500 million monthly user figure reflects both Threads’ rapid early expansion, which drew heavily on Instagram’s existing social graph, and more recent organic adoption. Time spent on the platform has increased sharply in markets such as South Korea and Japan. Meta has not released updated daily active user numbers since reporting 150 million last fall, but it described daily usage as growing strongly year over year.

In a media environment where attention remains concentrated on a handful of platforms, Threads’ emphasis on temporary, user-directed feed adjustments and bounded discussion groups represents a modest attempt to address longstanding complaints about algorithmic amplification and fragmented public conversation. Whether these tools meaningfully shift how people encounter information will depend on how widely they are adopted and how Meta continues to moderate the communities it hosts.