Threads hits 500 million users, launches Your Algo to hand control back to users

Threads has reached 500 million monthly active users, nearly three years after launching as a competitor to Twitter (now X). Meta announced the milestone on 16 June 2026 alongside Your Algo, a feature that lets users privately set what they want to see in their feed rather than posting it publicly.

The 50 million user gap between Threads and X (which reported approximately 550 million monthly active users as of May 2026) is the closest Threads has come to matching X since launch. More telling: Similarweb data shows Threads had 141.5 million daily active users on iOS and Android in January 2026, compared to X's 125 million mobile daily active users, with Threads first moving ahead of X in September 2025.

Why Your Algo matters more than the user count

Your Algo builds on the platform's Dear Algo tool launched in February, which let users tell Threads what they want to see more or less of by posting publicly, such as "Dear Algo, show me more posts about podcasts". The new feature makes those requests private.

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 they can manage both Dear Algo and Your Algo in one unified hub.

Your Algo is available in the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

The shift from public to private control is the real story. Because Dear Algo worked through public postings, others could see requests and even repost them to apply to their own feeds, an aspect that may have been a hindrance for some users who might not want their requests to be public, though Meta viewed this as a way for users to discover new conversations and topics.

Your Algo removes that friction. It's algorithmic transparency that doesn't require broadcasting your preferences or waiting for the platform to infer them from months of passive behaviour.

The broader algorithmic control trend

Threads isn't acting in isolation. People are now more aware of algorithmic influence and are seeking more ways to control their feeds, with platforms trying out new controls that enable people to have more of a say over what they're shown in-stream, while AI-based systems are also getting better at understanding personal relevance, down to specific topics and communication styles.

Regulation pressed platforms to offer more algorithmic choice and transparency, especially in the EU under the Digital Services Act. Facebook has expanded chronological feed options in select regions due to EU regulations, with early feedback suggesting users feel less manipulated and more in control.

The Dear Algo feature was inspired by users who started posting "dear threads algo" requests as a meme, as people had been complaining about Threads' recommendation algorithm since the platform's launch in July 2023. Meta formalised the joke into a working tool, then graduated it into something private and granular.

A similar "Your Algorithm" feature on Instagram lets users control what they want to see across Reels, the Explore tab, and the app's main feed.

What this means for social media professionals

The move hands social marketers a double-edged tool. On one hand, users who feel more in control of their feeds tend to stay longer and engage more deeply. On the other, manual feed control introduces unpredictability into reach and targeting assumptions.

If a user tells Threads to show them less content about a topic for seven days, branded content in that category vanishes from their feed regardless of how well it's performing elsewhere. Temporary, yes. But at scale, these private tweaks reshape who sees what, when.

Meta would likely prefer that users keep relying on its recommendations, which enables the system to show them more of the most engaging content in the app based on their detected interests, keeping people more engaged for longer, which is likely why it's not making this a permanent change option.

The time limits (one, three, or seven days) keep the feature from fundamentally dismantling Meta's engagement model. But they acknowledge something bigger: by late 2025, one theme was unmistakable across platforms (engagement for engagement's sake wasn't enough), with platforms shifting from pure engagement metrics to social signals such as authenticity.

For brands, this means feed algorithms are becoming less of a black box and more of a negotiated space. The professionals who will win are the ones who build content people actively want to follow, not just content engineered to trigger passive scroll-stopping.

Communities exit beta

Alongside Your Algo, Meta is graduating communities out of beta and launching a suite of features including custom icons, expanded champion recognition, and more.

The communities feature has been one of the fastest-growing features on Threads since it launched last year. The company said communities have become a major driver of engagement on Threads.

The combination of user-controlled feeds and formalised interest communities positions Threads as something different from X: a platform that lets you shape what you see rather than relying entirely on what the algorithm thinks you want.

Whether that's a genuine philosophical shift or a strategic response to regulatory and user pressure is less important than the outcome. Half a billion people now have access to feed controls most platforms still won't offer.

Where Threads goes from here

From September 2025 to January 2026, Threads' monthly active user base grew by a remarkable 12.5%. Growth has steadied but hasn't stalled.

Advertising has become an increasingly central part of Threads' growth strategy, positioning it as a rival to X in the battle for digital ad spending. The platform began rolling out ads globally in early 2025. Your Algo complicates that model slightly, because users can now mute categories, but it also makes the feed feel less like an algorithmic hostage situation, which may keep people on the platform longer.

The real test isn't whether Threads can hit a billion users. It's whether manual feed control and community-driven structure can coexist with the engagement-maximising incentives that fund the platform. So far, Meta's threading that needle by making control temporary and encouraging topic-based clusters rather than pure chronological feeds.

For now, Your Algo is a feature. But if it works, it becomes the model: transparency you can act on, not just transparency you can read about in a blog post.