Instagram head Adam Mosseri has responded to calls for a Threads home feed that only features posts from accounts you follow, saying it’s “on the list” of features the platform would like to add. Mosseri sent the message in response to one message from YouTuber Marques Brownlee applying for the position, as well as to photographer Noah Kalina. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also chimed in, posting a thumbs up emoji in response to Brownlee’s request.
If your early experience with Meta’s Twitter competitor is similar to mine, your home feed is probably filled with posts from random accounts recommended to you by the service’s algorithm, in addition to content from accounts you’ve actually decided to follow. In my case, there are way more featured posts than the content I actually chose to see, but it’s hard to know how much of this is because Threads only launched a few hours ago and is still onboarding new users in their millions.
While both Adam Mosseri and Mark Zuckerberg have actively responded to the requests, their posts are far from a firm commitment to adding the feature. But given that the main Instagram app already offers a similar choice of feeds with a dedicated “Follow” list, it seems possible that Threads will take a similar approach. However, in the case of Instagram, the recommendations feed is still the default.
Meta is much more candid about its future plans to integrate Threads with ActivityPub, the decentralized social media protocol that’s the foundation of rival microblogging service Mastodon. Ultimately, the hope is that users of Threads will be able to interact with those of other ActivityPub-based services. Support for the protocol could even allow a Threads user to take their audience with them if they ever leave the service, Adam Mosseri told my colleague Alex Heath in a recent interview.
