First Major Meta Threads Update Is Here With Some Sorely Needed Features
Threads, the barebones Twitter clone from the house of Instagram, is getting a handful of fundamental social features that users have been asking for. Cameron Roth, who is a member of the Threads development team at Meta, shared that the app is finally getting a dedicated "follows" tab. When you open the Activity feed in the app by tapping on the heart icon at the bottom, you will see a new Follows button at the top.
Once you tap on the Follows button, you see a list of all the accounts you follow. Unlike Twitter, this is not a separate feed of activities from all accounts that you follow. Instead, on Threads, it's simply a list of all the accounts you follow, with their username and profile pictures in tow. In case you don't follow an account but still want to see their posts, there's now a neat subscribe feature to do just that. All you have to do is open an account's profile page and tap on the bell icon in the top-right corner of the screen.
The app will ask if you want to follow that account, but you can safely ignore that prompt. The latest update, which is currently limited to the app's iOS version, also adds dedicated Quotes and Reposts tabs on the activity feed. These are essentially analogous to the Quote Tweet and Retweet functionalities on Twitter. Instagram has also improved the scrolling experience across all the tabs in the activity feed.
It's not much, but it's still a step some progress
Another notable feature that has arrived on Threads is automatic post translations. However, it doesn't work the same way that translations work on Instagram or Twitter. Beneath any post's text content that is not in English — and adjacent to the line where you see the number of likes and replies for a Threads post — a translate icon will appear.
On Instagram, the app shows a dedicated "See Translation" button, which changes to "See Original" once you tap on it. However, the underlying mechanism for generating a translated version of posts is the same as that of Instagram. And that means it's only good for basic translations, and will fumble dramatically when it comes to colloquial phrases and idioms.
If you've already installed the latest update for Threads on iOS, but don't see all the features mentioned above, you might have to close and restart the app. If they still don't appear, you might have to wait a bit for them to appear. Roth says Threads relies on a "system of server-delivered flags which can take a while to fully release." If you are rocking an Android but still want to test the latest features, you can sign up for the Threads beta testing program.