Threads hits 500 million users and launches Your Algo, the private feed control that could end 'Dear Algo' posts

Threads reached 500 million monthly active users on 17 June 2026, marking the platform's arrival as a genuine rival to X and validating Meta's three-year bet on text-based social. But the more significant shift arrived the same week: Your Algo, a private feed control tool that lets users tell Threads what topics they want to see more or less of, without broadcasting those requests publicly.

The change matters because it reverses the logic that powered one of Threads' most visible content formats. Since February, users have been able to post "Dear Algo" requests, public messages asking the algorithm to surface more of a topic or suppress another. To use Dear Algo, Threads users craft a public post that begins with "Dear Algo" and explains the kind of content they want to see, and the feed adjusts for three days.

Your Algo does the same thing, but privately. Users can tell Threads they want to see more or less of certain topics and choose how long the request lasts: one, three, or seven days. Only the user can see their requests, and both Dear Algo and Your Algo are managed in one unified hub.

For social media professionals, this is the moment to rewrite community management briefs. If users no longer need to post publicly to shape their feeds, brands no longer need to coach them to do so. The "Dear Algo, show me more posts about [your brand category]" era may be over before it really started.

What Your Algo actually changes

Your Algo lets users privately tell the app to show more or less of a topic for one, three or seven days, building on February's Dear Algo, which did the same thing but only through a public post. The feature is rolling out in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

The public-to-private shift mirrors what happened across recommendation systems in the past two years. Instagram launched a similar "Your Algorithm" feature in December 2025, TikTok offers "Manage Topics", and YouTube has "Customize Your Feed". Companies are tapping into AI to give users more influence over their feeds rather than relying entirely on opaque systems.

But Threads made the public version first, and that created its own dynamic. Dear Algo posts became content in their own right. Users shared them, reposted them to apply others' preferences, and turned algorithmic negotiation into a visible, participatory act. Users can repost someone else's Dear Algo request to apply their content preferences to their own feed.

Your Algo keeps the mechanism but removes the theatre. That makes it more useful for individuals and less useful for brands trying to seed behaviour. A community manager briefed to encourage "Dear Algo, show me more sustainable fashion" posts in the replies now faces a platform where users can make that request without ever saying it aloud.

Why this matters for brands and community teams

Most platform updates change what you can do. This one changes what your audience needs you to do, and therefore what your team should stop doing.

If your current Threads strategy includes prompting followers to post Dear Algo requests, or modelling that behaviour in your own posts to drive discovery, the return on that tactic is about to fall. Users who wanted algorithmic control but didn't want to post about it publicly now have another route. The ones still posting Dear Algo requests will increasingly be the ones who see the post itself as content, not a functional workaround.

That doesn't make Dear Algo worthless. It does make it niche. The shift from broadcast to private mirrors the broader pattern across social: platforms are adding more settings, and users are learning to use them. The community manager's job is not to teach people how to configure their feed. It's to make content worth configuring the feed to see.

The practical implication: spend less time gaming algorithmic signals through performative user prompts, and more time creating the content people would actively choose to see more of. Your Algo makes preference explicit. If someone uses it to suppress your category, you won't talk them out of it with a "Dear Algo" campaign.

The growth context: 500 million users and closing the gap with X

Threads added 100 million monthly users in the past 10 months, after reporting 400 million monthly active users in August 2025. That puts it within striking distance of X, which reported approximately 550 million monthly active users as of May 2026, according to a SpaceX prospectus filing.

The gap is now 50 million users, the closest Threads has come since launch. For media buyers and strategists, that makes Threads harder to dismiss as experimental. The combination of a growing user base and expanding ad tools makes Threads harder to ignore. It is no longer an experimental offshoot of Instagram. At almost half a billion monthly users, it is a real destination.

But user count alone doesn't define a platform's value to marketers. What matters is whether those users show up daily, whether they engage, and whether brands can reach them. Threads still does not publish daily active user figures, and Meta has not disclosed revenue from Threads ads. The scale is real; the commercial model is still maturing.

Live Chat co-hosting: the other update brands should watch

Announced the same week, and less widely covered, Threads expanded its Live Chats feature to support up to three co-hosts, making it easier to manage conversations. Threads is expanding the ability to start Live Chats to all "Community Champions," users who are highly followed within their communities and keep conversations active.

Live Chats launched in April as Threads' answer to the real-time conversation gap, the one area where X still held a structural advantage. Up to 150 participants can actively send messages in a chat. Once this limit is reached, additional users can still view the conversation, react to messages, and participate in polls in "spectator" mode.

The co-hosting addition makes the feature viable for brands running live events, product launches, or panel-style discussions. Instead of a single moderator struggling to manage a fast-moving chat, you can bring in a guest expert, a creator partner, or a second voice from your team. Threads says this capability is the equivalent of having a guest on your show or another voice to moderate a conversation.

If your brand is already running live commentary on X during events, Live Chats are now worth testing on Threads. The format is different (capped participation, more structured, less chaotic), but the intent is the same: be present when your audience is paying attention to something happening right now.

What to do differently

Three practical shifts for social teams:

Stop coaching users to post Dear Algo requests. The tactic had a brief window when it was the only way to give the algorithm explicit direction. That window is closing. Users who want feed control now have a private, more flexible tool. If you're still scripting "Dear Algo" prompts into your content calendar, cut them.

Focus on being worth choosing, not being seen by accident. Your Algo makes preference an active choice. If someone tells Threads to show them more posts about sustainable travel, your sustainable travel content gets a direct boost, but only if it's good enough that they wanted to make that choice in the first place. Algorithmic tricks matter less when users can set their own priorities.

Test Live Chats for event-based content. If you're running product drops, live panels, or reacting to industry news in real time, the co-hosting structure now supports it properly. This isn't a replacement for X's open, chaotic live conversation style. It's an alternative: more structured, more manageable, and accessible to a different audience.

The algorithm control arms race

Threads launched Dear Algo in February. Instagram's Your Algorithm arrived in December 2025. TikTok has Smart Keyword Filters. YouTube lets you tune recommendations. Every major platform is now racing to prove that users can control what they see, because the alternative, an opaque black box, is no longer defensible.

The paradox for marketers is that more user control doesn't mean less algorithmic influence. It means more explicit influence. Instead of inferring preference from passive behaviour (watch time, scroll speed, hesitation), platforms are asking users to state it directly. That data is cleaner, more actionable, and harder to game.

For brands, it raises the bar. When someone could only signal disinterest by scrolling past, there was always a chance you'd catch them on a better day. When they can actively tell the algorithm to suppress your category for a week, you're out. The cost of being irrelevant or annoying just went up.

The unresolved questions

Meta has not said whether Your Algo requests feed back into the broader algorithm, or whether they're isolated to the individual user's experience. If someone tells Threads to show more posts about cooking for a week, and engages heavily with that content, does the algorithm learn that cooking content performs well in general? Or does it treat that week as an artificial spike, isolated from the larger model?

That matters. If Your Algo preferences influence the wider system, brands in popular categories get an indirect boost every time a user opts in. If they don't, Your Algo is purely defensive: a way to avoid content, not a way to discover it.

Meta also has not clarified whether Your Algo overrides other signals, or whether it works alongside them. If a user asks to see more travel content, but then ignores every travel post that appears, does the algorithm honour the explicit request or revert to behaviour-based ranking? The answer changes how much weight brands should place on being in categories users actively select versus being engaging enough to survive behavioural filtering.

These aren't academic questions. They're the difference between a feature that redistributes reach and one that just gives users an off switch.

The bigger picture: Threads is still defining what it is

At 500 million users, Threads is no longer emerging. It's arrived. But what it's arrived as is still unclear. Is it the calmer, more conversational alternative to X? The text-first sibling of Instagram? A community platform with algorithmic distribution? A real-time news surface?

The features Meta is shipping suggest all of the above. Your Algo and Dear Algo point toward personalisation and user control. Live Chats point toward real-time event engagement. Communities point toward niche discussion spaces. The For You feed points toward algorithmic discovery. Threads is assembling the pieces, but the platform's identity is still being written by how people actually use it.

For marketers, that means the playbook is not settled. What works today may not work in six months, not because the algorithm changed, but because the culture of the platform did. The advantage goes to teams willing to test, learn, and adapt quickly, rather than those waiting for a stable set of best practices to emerge.

Threads has the scale. It has the features. What it doesn't yet have is a defined role in the social media stack that everyone agrees on. That ambiguity is either risk or opportunity, depending on how early you're willing to move.