Threads Will Now Display Alternate Feeds at the Top of the Main Feed

Threads is rolling out yet another Bluesky-inspired feature, with your various feeds now set to remain visible on the home screen, so you can more easily switch across to your “Following” or “For You” recommended stream, or any of your custom lists.

As you can see in this example, shared by IG/Threads chief Adam Mosseri, now, rather than having to tap on the Threads icon at the top of the feed to make your alternative feed options show, they’ll be present on-screen, while you’ll also be able to easily swipe across to each.  

Which also means that the current Threads functionality of indicating “Like” or “See less” by swiping left or right on a post will be gone.

As per Threads:

“Some of you have asked about swiping on posts. Now, tap the heart to like a post if you want to see more like it. If you want to see less of something, tap the three-dot menu, then “Not interested.”

So Threads is going back to the more traditional social media functions, as opposed to using swipes as an indicator. Which I’m guessing not many people used anyway, as it’s not a well-known, and thus, overly intuitive UI.

So after months of requests for a default Following feed, a better process for growing followers, and improved search, Threads has now rolled out all of these within the space of a few weeks.

Which has been spurred by Bluesky, and the sudden rise in attention for the Twitter clone, decentralized social app.

The U.S. election seemed to be the trigger, with many finding that Threads’ algorithm-defined feeds were virtually useless for keeping up with the latest news on the day. Because Threads is optimizing for engagement, not timeliness, while it also actively supresses political content. So, unsurprisingly, when major political news is dominating discussion, Threads is no good, and that seems to have pushed more users to at least try out Bluesky instead.

And what many have found (and most importantly, journalists), is that building an audience, and getting reach for news content, is easier on Bluesky.

Which makes sense. The ability to default to your “Following” feed on Bluesky gives users more motivation to actually populate that stream, by following users in the app, while Threads’ emphasis on algorithmic recommendations renders following obsolete to some degree, as you can just rely on the algorithm to show you the best stuff, relative to your interests.

Bluesky also doesn’t suppress links, nor political content, and with all of these factors, you can see why it appeals to writers and publishers, who are using social platforms to boost referral traffic, as much as they are to engage.

Which is exactly why Meta’s entertainment-focused, non-political, algorithmic approach, which has worked on Facebook and IG, will not work on Threads.

A key consideration, in terms of building a rival to what Twitter had been, is that only a small proportion of Twitter users ever actually posted anything in the app, with the vast majority of users passively consuming content. In fact, 80% of Twitter users, on average, never posted, liked, commented, or engaged in the app in any way. They just went to the app every day to get the latest news.

Which is what Twitter was good for, keeping up with the latest, up-to-the-minute updates in whatever niche you’re interested in. Conversation around sport, politics, business sectors, TV shows, all of this is where Twitter was hugely valuable, with key voices sharing their thoughts, and their dedicated fans tuning in. Those posts, updates, and ideas would then get disseminated to other apps, which meant that while Twitter never had comparable audience size to Facebook or Instagram, its influence remained significant.

But the key point is, if you’re trying to build a Twitter-like platform, you’re appealing to that key segment of active users to keep the app flowing. And right now, for at least some of these key users, Blueksy is holding more appeal.

Does having more followers give you more reach? Maybe, maybe not, but that’s not even relevant, because the people who are actively posting are going to feel more aligned to the app where they can build their own audience.

These users want to share links, and discuss whatever topic they choose without the fear of reach penalties. Bluesky offers this, and while it’s still only a fraction of the size of Threads, the Threads team still needs to wake up and recognize the unique value of real-time social apps, in variance to its other platforms.

A Bluesky seems to have provided that wake-up call in some respects. And now we wait and see whether Threads can re-capture the “trending app of the moment” title.