Meta is pulling its X counterpart further into interest-based chatter with a feature called Communities that will bring more than 100 topic hubs to gather conversation around sports, TV, music fandoms, books, and other passions. The move takes direct aim at the territory X had staked out with its own Communities, but adds a Meta-like spin on how groups are made — as well as surfacing and moderation.
Product for the Interest Graph on Threads
Communities provide Threads users with dedicated spaces in which to post and respond about a shared interest, and the groups that they join will be visible on their profile. Users can reorder their app entirely so that a favorite community becomes the home feed, further shortening the loop between discovery and habit.
The new feature codifies a behavior Threads users were already engaging in. Shortly after its launch, the app’s audience settled into Topic Tags — vaguely hashtag-ish things without the actual symbol — forming de facto communities in places like NBA Threads. Now, Meta is formalizing those patterns into official product mechanics, an approach that enabled an earlier cohort of social platforms to turn nascent user behavior into mainstream features.
How Threads Differs From X Communities in Practice
There are some typical features: Posts from communities and their content can also be widely displayed on For You pages and Following feeds, not just inside the community. The differences are in governance and participation. On X, the community features are user-built and run to look like a smaller version of Reddit; posts are open for public viewing, but access to discussions is given only to those who make an account. Threads takes a more centralized approach: Meta curates and builds its own communities; invitations go out to people who aren’t yet members, with special privileges reserved for the initiated.
That design has trade-offs. A centrally seeded catalog could certainly cut down on duplication, moderation, and spam at launch, but it could also limit the long tail of niche groups users might make for themselves. Meta’s wager is strong, well-managed hubs focused on high-interest topics may seed healthier network effects and reduce the confusion for newcomers.
What Users Will Get at Launch of Threads Communities
Each community has its own custom Like emoji — say, a basketball in NBA or a stack of books for Book Threads — which for some reason can be accrued by its users through active participation.
Highly active community builders, Meta says, will be able to secure a profile badge that demonstrates credibility inside and outside of the group.
Discovery is a focus. Meta will be trying out better ranking systems that feature standout posts first — both within communities and on the wider For You feed — in an effort to tamp down low-quality replies, while elevating time-sensitive conversation starters. The company also says that communities you join will serve as decoration for your Threads profile, in support of making interests more readily apparent when glancing through and helping other users find you over mutual topics.
Why Meta Is Going Curated With Threads Communities
Centralizing creation offers Meta the ability to apply uniform rules — use it, censoring Bob vs. new guy posting fake reviews at Zendesk — bootstrapping its internal moderation tools on Day One, and rolling out guardrails before allowing users to build in user-built groups. That’s pragmatic for a platform that has expanded rapidly — Meta has said it has over 400 million monthly active users — and is still tweaking its recommendation systems. That also fits a pattern that Instagram has had where they basically start natively in their app to incubate new surfaces and then eventually open it up a little bit.
Product leadership has teased that direction for weeks; Instagram head Adam Mosseri had previously hinted at the feature ahead of the broader rollout. The early testing group was active community builders put in place to stress-test ranking, tone, and norms before scaling.
Early Traction And Battle In The Competitive Arena
Third-party analytics firms like Similarweb and Sensor Tower have observed Threads catching up to X on mobile daily actives in some key markets, though performance varies by region. If engagement is concentrated inside topic hubs, for instance, it might soak up more time per session and deliver better retention — two data points advertisers and creators pay close attention to as they allocate resources.
As far as X was concerned, crowd-sourced communities had proved efficient and swift at the expense of coherence. Threads is placing bets on reliability and curation as its differentiator. If Meta’s ranking experiments reliably rank better posts, both from within and outside communities, inside of For You, the feature could be a killer new user on-ramp for people entering through trending but lacking social graph connections.
What Comes Next for Threads Communities and Users
Meta is promising to broaden out from the narrow set of interests once it sees what resonates and start establishing a matrix for moderation and ranking, potentially opening up to smaller groups even there. The company’s next tests, profile badges for builders, smarter post ordering, and deeper integration with discovery will show how much Communities can rip up the app’s home experience.
If Threads turns its current Topic Tag culture into strong communities while not killing the openness, it’ll pull X on the feature set that was supposed to anchor interest-based conversation. The ultimate proof will be consistency: fewer drive-by replies, more returning members, and a quantifiable lift in high-signal posts per topic.
