The new "activity status" feature, which will come on the new Meta X competitor Threads, allows you to see when someone on the social network is online. That's according to an announcement posted Tuesday by Instagram head Adam Mosseri on Threads, who explained that the new feature was intended to serve as "a way to help you find others to engage with in real-time.".

Fortunately, you can turn that setting off, so people who have turned it on will be the only ones able to see that you are online.

Since it launched a year ago, threads had been lagging behind X, formerly known as Twitter, in surfacing real-time events and trends. Compared with X, finding actual real-time reactions and responses to live events like awards shows and earthquakes is easier on the service. The new feature that came from this was launched by Threads as it tried to maximize real-time activity on the app.

Activity status could be considered, too, as the response of Threads to the incoherent lack of DMs on the platform. On X, if you want to begin a conversation with somebody, you can just message them, and since that is impossible on Threads, Meta looks for ways through which conversations will now take place on the social network. According to Mosseri, the company hopes "that knowing when your people are online makes it easier to have conversations.".

Of course, not everyone will want others to know when they're online: activities status features traditionally sit on messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger and Discord, not places like X.

A glance to the comments on Mosseri's announcement post indicates that several users do not want this feature-they require DMs instead, claiming that, if you can't call for an activity status from your phone, the status doesn't make much sense anyway.

Some also argue that the feature may endanger some users. For example, when you have a troll who starts trolling you, knowing that you are online at the moment may make them troll you even more.

The feature is rolling out starting today, so you might not see it yet. Mosseri didn't tell the users how to turn off the feature, but the users will probably find it within the app's settings page where they can do so.