As Bluesky surges, Threads begins testing custom feeds

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday announced the company’s X competitor, Threads, would begin testing custom feeds for specific topics and profiles, making it easier for users to find communities and conversations that interest them. The news follows the rapid growth of the social networking startup and X rival, Bluesky, which prioritizes tools that allow people to build their own algorithms and feeds, create lists, set their own moderation rules, and more.

Bluesky’s adoption has been picking up after the U.S. Presidential election, as X gained a more right-wing focus and X owner Elon Musk used the platform formerly known as Twitter to heavily campaign for Trump. As a result, a number of more left-leaning users have been moving to the X alternative Bluesky, which went from seeing around 700,000 new users added over a week to now 1 million new sign-ups in just 24 hours.

Likely wary of the potential in Bluesky’s momentum, Threads aims to cater to user demands for further personalization and customization.

Though Threads forces its “For You” algorithmic feed on users by default, the new feature will allow users to create feeds of their own, which they can use to follow specific individuals or topics.

To create a custom feed, you’ll first need to search for and then tap into a topic to see the latest posts. From there, you’ll tap on the three-dot icon next to the search term and choose the option “create new feed.” You can also choose to add specific user profiles to a feed by visiting the user’s profile, tapping the three-dot icon above their profile photo, and then tapping to add them to one of your feeds.

Not all Threads users have access to custom feeds as of yet, as Threads says the company is only beginning to test the feature.

If you are in the test group, you’ll be able to view your custom feeds by pulling down on the home screen, which will reveal the existing Following and For You feeds, along with any other custom feeds you’ve created so you can toggle between them.

Though custom feeds have been a top request from the Threads community, this method keeps them somewhat hidden in the user interface. People were already frustrated that Threads “For You” feed on election night was displaying stale content instead of real-time news, seemingly not even realizing that a Following feed was an option to them — an indication that Threads’ current user interface makes it more challenging to discover and switch between different feeds.

Whether or not Threads’ adoption of custom feeds will help to stem the rush of new users to Bluesky remains to be seen.

Meta’s Threads is still the largest X competitor, with now north of 275 million monthly active users, including the 15 million more sign-ups it saw in November alone.

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