Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed the company's X competitor, Threads will begin testing customized feeds for topics and profiles to help users find communities and conversations that they are more interested in. It follows the rapid growth of the social networking startup and X rival, Bluesky. The latter primarily focuses on tools that enable people to build their own algorithms and feeds, create lists, determine their moderation rules, and much more.

Now, a week after the U.S. presidential election, Bluesky has gained its adoption because X has taken on much more of a right-wing focus and X owner Elon Musk has used the platform formerly known as Twitter to heavily campaign for Trump. As such, a number of more left-leaning users have been moving to the X alternative Bluesky, which went from seeing some 700,000 new users added over the course of a week to now 1 million new sign-ups in just 24 hours.

Apparently not so enthusiastic about the potential in Bluesky's momentum, the new app is seen to answer demand by users for more personalization and customization.

Whereas Threads forces its "For You" algorithmic feed on its users by default, the new feature will give them the autonomy to generate their feeds, that they may subsequently use to follow specific individuals or topics.

To create a custom feed you have to search, then tap on the topic to see current posts. From there, you'll tap on the three-dot icon next to your search term and select the option "create new feed." Alternatively, you can also add specific user profiles to a feed by visiting the user's profile, tapping the three-dot icon above their profile photo, then tapping to add them to one of your feeds.

Not all Threads users have access to custom feeds yet-they say the company is only just testing the feature.

If you're in the test group, you can view your custom feeds by pulling down on the home screen, revealing not just the existing Following and For You feeds but any other custom feeds you have created, so you may toggle between them.

While custom feeds have been a big plus in terms of appeal to the Threads community, that approach does bury them somewhat in the interface. People were already annoyed that on election night, Threads's "For You" feed was showing stale content and not real-time news — apparently, not even aware that a Following feed was an option for them — an indication that Threads's current user interface makes it harder to discover and switch between various feeds.

Whether or not this will do anything to stem the tide of new users moving to Bluesky remains to be seen.

Meta's Threads is still the largest X competitor, with now north of 275 million monthly active users, including the 15 million more sign-ups it saw in November alone.