With Twitter clone Bluesky on the rise and seemingly spurring Threads into action, Meta's own Twitter-like app is rolling out a range of updates that seem to be specifically designed to address concerns which many have cited as reasons as to why they find Bluesky more appealing.

Earlier this week, Threads rolled out custom, keyword-based feeds to all users, a much requested feature, while it's now also prompting users to review their political content settings.
Which, in the wake of the U.S. election, is now a less risky element, and active prompts like this could help to address user requests to make the app a more real-time feed of updates, of all kinds.

And now, Instagram head Adam Mosseri says the app is implementing another alteration that could make Threads feel even more like what Twitter used to be.
According to Mosseri:
"We are rebalancing ranking to prioritize content from people you follow, which will mean less recommended content from accounts you don't follow and more posts from the accounts you do starting today.

This has also been one of the criticisms of Threads in light of Bluesky to the effect that you can't by default arrive at the "Following" feed on Threads. That's because algorithmic recommendations drive a lot more engagement, which, in turn, also makes following, as a concept, less relevant in the modern social media landscape.

But many Threads users have complained that they've struggled to grow their audience in the app, so the Threads team is now trying to address this by putting more emphasis on followers, and making following a stronger driver of reach.

This could have benefits in helping users build their own audience in the app, but it will also impact overall engagement on Threads.

Which Mosseri also acknowledges:

"For you creators out there, you should see unconnected reach go down and connected reach go up."

Mosseri further notes that this is "a work in progress" and as "balancing the ability to reach followers and overall engagement is tricky".

For one thing, Meta has significantly increased engagement on both Facebook and IG (and likely Threads) with the introduction of AI-suggested posts from accounts you don't follow, which now constitutes 50% of the content people see in their Instagram feeds.

So Meta would seem to be doing this begrudgingly, in response to the concerns expressed by users. And while Bluesky currently boasts a fraction of Threads' audience -- 20 million compared to 275 million in Threads -- clearly there's been a significant upsurge in interest in the rival app; which, again, does seem to be goading the threads team to reassess their approach to at least a degree.
Though it won’t be switching to a full chronological feed of posts from profiles that you’ve chosen to follow as the default. The “Following” feed will remain secondary, because again, Meta knows that its algorithmic “For You” feed drives more engagement.

But actually, that's the critical factor which Threads needs, as it currently lacks the freshness that Twitter once did while way back, that real-time pulse feel that the constantly updating stream of tweets kept you connected to the latest events and happenings in your world, and your topics of interest.

Unfortunately for the former users of Twitter, that era is now over due to the success of algorithmic feeds. Indeed, Threads might allow its users to set to default mode "Following", but it is noted by Mosseri that engagement will go down. The app has greater winner in pushing a stream of most-engaging posts aligned to your interests.

However, it is different from what Twitter had been once.

That's not to say that this is better-as much of the suggested posts you will receive are just a lot of time-wasting frippery. However, the more time spent, the more views Meta can expect, and it might be hard for Meta to ignore that in its endeavor to refocus on a pure "Following" feed instead.

But if it did, that would be the thing that really enabled users to build their own audiences in the app. If you had to actually follow a profile in order to see their posts, and then effectively curate your feed, follower counts would inevitably skyrocket, which would be a big step toward re-creating that Twitter feel and winning over top creators.

Instead, Meta will try a few compromise measures here and there that won't be the same but might alleviate some creator concerns around follower counts at least.