Meta's X rival Threads is launching a new "activity status" feature that lets you see when someone on the social network is online. Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the feature in a Threads post on Tuesday, saying it is "a way to help you find others to engage with in real-time."

Luckily, it can be disabled; then, those who have it enabled will know you are online.

Since it was launched last year, Threads has failed to catch up with X (formerly Twitter) in surfacing real-time events and trends. You are more likely to find real-time reactions and responses to live events like awards shows and earthquakes on X than on Threads. The new feature that Threads is trying to pump up real-time activity in its app is:.

Activity status would perhaps be another term describing the way Threads reacts to a lack of DMs in the platform. For a user on X, a conversation can start between a user and someone by giving that person a message when a user wants. This doesn't work on Threads, hence why Meta is finding alternative means of having conversations with its social network. The company hopes "that knowing when your people are online makes it easier to have conversations.".

Of course, not everyone will want other people to know when they are online. That is because activity status features have traditionally been associated with messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger and Discord, not with platforms like X.

A quick read through the comments on the post by Mosseri, the head of Instagram, shows that most are uninterested in this, some asking for DMs, which suggests that it makes no sense to introduce an activity status feature when you cannot directly message the user.

In fact, some claim this feature is dangerous to some users. For instance, when a user is being trolled by someone, the likelihood of him trolling that person back even harder increases knowing the latter is currently online on the platform.

It will rollout today, so you have not seen it yet. Mosseri did not tell users how to enable the feature, but if the users wanted to be able to do this, they would have to browse through the settings page of the application.