Threads: Instagram boss says it will fix major problems with app, including using multiple accounts and feed

Chronological feeds and the ability to change accounts are all on their way, management says

Meta Twitter Rival (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

Instagram’s team is working on a number of updates for its new Threads app, its management has said.

Meta launched Threads – a Twitter rival that is built by the Instagram team and uses its branding – late on Wednesday. It has already gained some 70 million users, capitalising on chaos and technical problems at Twitter.

But it is still without a number of major features, including those that are readily available on Twitter. The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, has been responding to users on the Threads app itself promising that a number of those features are coming.

Chief among them is the option to change between accounts. Even though Threads is a separate app from Instagram, users must sign up with an Instagram account – which is then stuck signed in, without the option to quickly switch between other accounts.

Mr Mosseri said that and many other additional features were being worked on by its team.

Those other tools including a devoted desktop version, better search and hashtags, and better integration between Threads and Instagram so that posts can be shared between the two.

But perhaps the biggest request has been for a chronological feed that includes posts only from those accounts that a user actually follows. At the moment, Threads is built around one news feed that is filled with algorithmically chosen content, much of which comes from accounts that a user has not explicitly chosen to subscribe to.

Mr Mosseri said that was being worked on, and could arrive in the “next couple weeks”, but it was not necessarily a priority. “I do think a lot of why people are getting so much engagement right now is because you don’t need to follow a bunch of people in order to discover a bunch of new accounts in feed,” he wrote.

Threads has ruled out some expected changes, too. That includes direct messages, with Mr Mosseri suggesting that he did not want to give users another inbox to check, with Meta already offering a number of other messaging platforms.

Both Mr Mosseri and his boss, Mark Zuckerberg, have ruled out any rush to put ads into Threads. Mr Zuckerberg said that the site would decide on ads when the app was moving towards a billion users, and that for now the company was working on getting even more scale.