Meta’s Threads is doubling down on support for custom feeds as it faces challenges from the growing social network Bluesky, now with over 30 million users, which also offers custom feeds as one of its key features. On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that users can now set their custom feeds to be public and follow custom feeds made by others.
Meta thinks that its custom feeds are superior to others because they can be built without technical skills by anyone. With public feeds, people can now take advantage of feeds built by others and pin them to their home screen.
The launch is designed to further challenge Bluesky, which introduced the idea of custom feed building as part of its social network, a rival to X.
While Bluesky has largely benefitted from an influx of people leaving X for something that looks and feels similar, it’s managed to retain its early adopters thanks to its variety of tools that allow people to make the network their own, including custom feeds. Today, those feeds are built both by the Bluesky team and other third-party developers, letting people switch between different views of the network, instead of being forced to default only to Bluesky’s algorithmic feed, “Discover.”
As Bluesky grew, Threads then also capitalized on user demand for more personalization, rolling out its own version of custom feeds to global users last November. The move came only days after Zuckerberg announced that a test of the feature was live, signaling Meta was working quickly to topple some of Bluesky’s momentum.
To use Threads’ custom feeds, you’ll first search for a topic to see the latest posts then tap on the three-dot menu and choose “Create New Feed.” You can also customize feeds by adding specific user profiles to a given feed by tapping on the three-dot icon above a user’s profile photo and then adding them to the feed of your choice.
To now make those feeds public, you’ll tap and hold the feed and then tap “Edit Feeds.” From here, you can toggle your feed to “Public.”
Threads will also let you share your public feed with others through a link or DM by tapping “View Feed” from the Edit Feeds settings where you can use the quote icon to post a preview of your custom feed. You then use the “Share Feed” button to send the custom feed out to others.
Feeds can be found under a new “Feeds” tab on profiles.
Since launching, Threads users have created custom feeds around topics like sports, books, art, astronomy, fashion, poetry, design, and more.
However, unlike Bluesky, Threads’ custom feeds are mainly focused on interests, whereas Bluesky’s custom feeds can either be interest-based or just different ways to sort and filter the content on Bluesky. For instance, Bluesky offers feeds that focus on what’s trending in your network, those that help you catch up on what you’ve missed, those that focus only on video, and more.
