Tag: app-subdomain-redirection:threads-from-instagram

Threads, the “Twitter of Meta,” is working on a new feature for Threads clearly inspired by the “Starter Packs” of Bluesky, its direct rival along with Twitter itself. These community-created user lists allow newcomers to find interesting profiles to follow. In the case of Threads, the “recommended follow lists” would also be created by the platform’s users, as noted by technologist Chris Medina (via TechCrunch), who discovered the feature in testing.

While Bluesky designed the Starter Packs to quickly connect new users with others of similar interests, Meta might be adopting this idea despite the fact that it already uses the Instagram social network to suggest profiles. Threads benefits from data from Instagram and other Meta applications to infer user interests, but it seems that the enormous popularity of Bluesky’s Starter Packs is motivating Meta to explore more personalized options.

In the current tests of this new feature, only a list called “NBA Threads” appears, attributed to a user of the social network. This suggests that these lists will not be directly managed by Meta, but will be in the hands of the Threads community members themselves. Although Meta has not yet officially confirmed this feature, several tests conducted by TechCrunch indicate that it is in an advanced stage of development.

Meta has been incorporating more features inspired by Bluesky into Threads in recent months, such as the ability to change the default feed and adjustments in the algorithm to prioritize content from followed accounts. A series of measures aimed at curbing the growth of Bluesky, which has gone from 9 to more than 23 million users in just two months.

With over 35 million new users on Threads during November, Meta continues to try to strengthen its position in the market, in response to the rapid expansion of a rival that is on everyone’s lips.

Meta has announced a new expansion of Threads, the “Twitter of Instagram”, in the so-called “fediverse”. From now on, users over 18 years old will be able to like and see the replies to their posts on the social network, which already appear on other platforms that use the ActivityPub protocol, such as Mastodon and Bluesky.

Access to the fediverse, which is in beta phase, was initially available to users in the United States, Canada, and Japan beginning in March, but now it’s been extended to more than 100 countries, according to Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

From now on, users accessing the Threads application will see a new tutorial that explains what the fediverse is. The tutorial describes it as a network of interconnected servers and provides information on how the exchange between federated platforms works, helping users to better understand this social network.

Meta indicates that users who choose to share their posts on the fediverse will see their Threads messages available in other applications that also use ActivityPub, such as Mastodon. Additionally, “Likes” and replies from other federated social networks will be available directly in Threads. However, in this beta phase, only top-level messages and their own replies will be federated, excluding other types of messages such as polls and those with reply controls.

To activate this feature, users must go to their Account Settings and select the option “Fediverse Sharing (Beta)”, where they will also find detailed instructions and a link to the Supplementary Privacy Policy of Threads.

With this integration, Threads has become the largest application in the fediverse, with over 150 million monthly active users in the month of April. Excluding Threads, the fediverse has over 11 million users total, and about 800,000 of these have come from Mastodon.

Last week, Meta started testing private messages on Threads, an option that, surprisingly for a social network, has not existed in the app since its launch last year. Since Friday, some users of Threads have started seeing a new option with the text “Message” on user profiles.

Discovered by user Chris Messina, the new private messaging option in Threads will basically allow you to send messages to users within the app. While this is expected in a feature like this, what’s surprising is that the messages will not be sent through Threads, but through Instagram.

For many users, it may come as a shock that Threads relies on Instagram to send private messages, but the company had already warned about it in the past. In November, after a series of hints in the code of Threads that hinted at the possible launch of private messages in the app, the director of Threads, Adam Mosseri, said that “Threads app is built on top of the Instagram app, which is probably why you are seeing [the lines of code related to private messages]”, and he concluded by saying: “We are not developing private messages in Threads”.

A few days after Meta shared a demonstration of the integration of Threads in the fediverse, the company has taken the following steps in its decentralized social experiment. Starting this week, users of the app over 18 years old and residents of the United States, Canada or Japan can now share their posts on Threads with servers compatible with ActivityPub.

Threads users who meet the requirements can now display their content on other decentralized social apps and tools, such as Mastodon and WordPress. Users of these services will be able to follow, like, and respond to Threads posts without needing a Threads account, providing more reach and engagement options derived from the Threads experience.

However, integration does have several limitations at the moment. Apart from regional restrictions, Threads users will also not be able to see who has liked their messages in this initial phase, nor the responses from people in the fediverse on the app.

Meta also points out that there are certain types of messages and content that are not yet federated, such as messages with restricted replies, replies to non-federated messages, posts with polls, and reposts of non-federated posts, among others. Quoted messages will also not work, as they are not compatible with ActivityPub, while messages containing links will have an attached link at the end, according to the protocols.

Users who meet the requirements will be able to activate the option “Share on the fediverse” in the Threads settings, which will now also include a brief explanation of what the fediverse is and how it works.

With the option to share in the fediverse enabled, users will be able to publish on services that use ActivityPub. Threads delays publication in the fediverse for five minutes, giving time to edit or delete the post before distribution. Profiles with this feature will have a “pill” icon, indicating the possibility of accessing users’ fediverse usernames.

During the FediForum conference, Peter Cottle, software engineer at Meta, explained how Threads users will soon be able to link their accounts to the fediverse, a decentralized social platform network that allows sharing messages through multiple channels, expanding the audience reach.

In the demonstration, Cottle showed that users will be able to activate the “share on fediverse” option in the Threads settings, after which we will see a pop-up window with an explanation about the concept of fediverse, along with some warnings to inform users about the implications of activating this function.

Key points include the need for a public profile to share posts on the fediverse and the current inability to view replies in the alpha test (only “likes” can be seen).

Cottle stated that Meta is already working to overcome these limitations, although he warns that Threads cannot guarantee the deletion of messages on other platforms if they are deleted on Threads, highlighting a limitation of the current protocol. The Meta engineer mentioned the importance of users being aware that posts may remain visible on other servers.

With federated sharing enabled, users will be able to post on services that use ActivityPub. Threads delays posting to the fediverse for five minutes, allowing time to edit or delete the post before distribution. Profiles with this feature will have a “pill” icon, indicating the ability to access users’ fediverse usernames.

Threads is launching a test in the United States of a new feature that displays a list of popular topics that other users are talking about. According to Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, the new list will appear on the search page and in the For You feed, allowing you to browse posts about a specific topic.

The director of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, explains that Threads uses artificial intelligence and machine learning systems to determine what is included in this new list, called “Topics of the day”, and takes into account how many people are talking about a specific topic and how many people have interacted with posts about it.

In addition, Mosseri has wanted to clarify that an internal team of the company will be responsible for ensuring the proper adaptation of the listed topics: “Our team of content specialists will ensure that the topics do not violate our Community Guidelines or other applicable integrity guidelines, and that the topics are not duplicated, absurd or misleading”.

This new feature could be of great help for Threads in attracting users and generating conversations on the social network, something that has been one of its weak points so far.

The joy has been short-lived, dear friends. Yesterday, Monday, various users of Threads, the new social network from Meta, were able to see and test a new option that allowed them to sort search results chronologically. However, the Threads team has reversed the feature because it was implemented by mistake.

While Threads is becoming more and more popular among users worldwide (including Europe, where it has recently become available), people are very critical of some of the current tools of the social network. One of them is the search feature, which, like in other social networks, allows us to explore the thousands of posts on Threads. But, where is the problem exactly? The problem is that the results are listed only by relevance (algorithmically, that is).

For now, Threads does not allow sorting search results by chronological order (from oldest to newest, or vice versa), but for a few hours, many users were able to test this option thanks to a development team error in Threads.

“Earlier today, an internal prototype was accidentally made available to a small number of people – this is not something we are currently testing externally,” the Threads team told TechCrunch.

While the news is a cold shower, it shouldn’t catch us by surprise at this point. Last month, when asked about the possibility of filtering search results by date, Instagram’s director, Adam Mosseri, completely ruled out the option, stating that “it would create a significant security loophole”.

“To clarify, having a comprehensive list of *every* post with a specific word in chronological order inevitably means that spammers and other bad actors will clutter the view with content simply by adding relevant words or tags,” Mosseri said in a thread on Threads. “And before you ask why we don’t remove that bad content, understand that there is much more unwanted content than we can or should remove.”

Threads is flooded with recommended posts that border on the thin line between legality and illegality. This has become a problem for the app, according to Instagram’s director, Adam Mosseri, and the Threads team is working to solve it.

In a post on the social network, Mosseri points out that Threads users have been shown many contents that, while they may not be technically illegal, are close to it. A problem that the team is working to solve, while continuing to improve the platform, which is 6 months old.

However, the problem with this type of content that borders on the edge of legality is not new. Back in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, provided a comprehensive overview of the current issues with content consumption, and how controversial content inevitably always gains more traction on social media.

According to Zuckerberg: “One of the biggest problems that social networks face is that, if not controlled, people interact disproportionately with the most sensationalist and provocative content. It is not a new phenomenon. It is widespread in cable news and has been a staple of tabloid press for over a century. On a large scale, it can undermine the quality of public discourse and lead to polarization. In our case, it can also degrade the quality of our services.”

Zuckerberg also pointed out that this is a difficult challenge to solve, because “no matter where we draw the lines of what is allowed, as content gets closer to that line, people will engage with it more on average, even when they later tell us they don’t like the content.”

Now, thanks to its rapid growth, Threads would be going through the same thing, with disinformation posts becoming more and more frequent. Will Threads become another Twitter where “cryptomendas”, scammers, and dropshippers roam freely, or will they manage to find a solution in time?

Threads, the “Twitter” of Meta, is gaining popularity and success after its recent launch in the European Union. In order to not miss out on this momentum, the next big move for the app is the creation of its own API, which will allow direct publishing on Threads, as well as scheduling content, accessing analytics, and much more.

Although since the end of October we already knew that Threads is developing its own API, including the possibility of creating a TweetDeck-like tool (which allows you to view Twitter posts in different columns and schedule tweets, among other functions), Instagram’s director, Adam Mosseri, has recently pointed out that the development team is hard at work and, to start, they are developing a writing API.

According to Social Media Today, this future writing API would allow third parties to publish on Threads, making it easier for community managers to manage the social network from their tools, and allowing gamers to share images and videos from their game consoles, among many other possibilities. However, this future API would still not allow access to analytics or other types of information options.

The API is currently active and is in the testing phase, although only a few lucky ones have access to its current features. However, it is most likely to be available in the coming months, so there won’t be much waiting to try it out.

Threads will also combine the ActivityPub APIs and will also launch greater connectivity options, but the current situation regarding this is stagnant, as less attention is currently being paid to the development of such options.

In this way, Threads would be trying to fill a gap left by Twitter (whose current official name is “X”), which revoked public and free access to its API. Currently paid, Twitter’s API allowed access to analytical data that was very useful to fight against the spread of disinformation and hatred on the platform.