Threads adds Your Algo controls as monthly users hit 500 million

Meta is giving Threads users a more private hand on their feeds just as the app crosses 500 million monthly active users. The new Your Algo tool lets people ask for more or less of certain topics for one, three or seven days, a change that raises the central question behind the update: whether the product is handing over real control or refining a retention engine as Threads grows.

The biggest difference between the two personalization tools is visibility. Dear Algo, launched in February 2026, lets users publicly request more or less of certain topics, while Your Algo keeps those requests private and visible only to the user. Meta said the new tool is rolling out today in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

Meta said communities are the main driver of Threads growth, with interest clusters built around books, basketball, parenting and music. As part of the June 16 update, those communities are graduating out of beta and getting a Communities Hub in the main menu, custom community icons, progress indicators that show when a topic is close to becoming a community, expanded champion recognition, and local communities starting with native-language tags in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

For ordinary users, the update makes discovery more adjustable and more local. For creators and community leaders, the expanded champion recognition and the ability to surface a topic before it fully becomes a community give more structure to the people already organizing conversation inside Threads. For advertisers, the shift matters because a platform built around clearer interests and more defined communities can create cleaner signals about what users care about, even as Meta frames the feature set as user control.

Threads is also widening Live Chats to more communities in the coming weeks, adding co-hosting and the ability to quote moments to a feed. Meta first introduced communities on Threads in October 2025, and the latest changes push them further from an experiment toward a core part of the app’s identity.

Threads launched in July 2023 as a text-sharing app built by the Instagram team. Since then, Meta has added custom feeds, follower-only replies, reply approvals, Messaging, Threads Communities and Live Chats, steadily turning the service into a more interest-based, conversation-driven alternative to X. The 500 million-user milestone suggests that the bet on community and control is now central to Threads’ next stage of growth.