Meta's Threads just fired its biggest shot yet at X, officially launching Communities - dedicated spaces for users to chat about everything from basketball to K-pop. With over 400 million monthly users already on board, this move transforms Threads from a Twitter clone into something potentially more sticky and engaging than its predecessor.
Meta's Threads just escalated its war with X in a big way. The company officially rolled out Communities on Thursday, introducing over 100 dedicated spaces where users can dive deep into conversations about basketball, TV shows, books, and virtually any topic that gets people talking.
This isn't just another feature drop - it's a direct challenge to one of X's most successful engagement tools. But Meta isn't copying X's playbook exactly. While X Communities work more like Reddit, with users creating and moderating their own spaces, Threads takes a different approach entirely.
Meta controls all community creation on its platform. Users can't spin up their own communities, but here's the twist - non-members can still jump into discussions. That's a fundamental difference from X, where only community members can participate in the conversation.
The integration feels distinctly Threads-native too. When you join a community, it shows up on your profile, and each community gets its own custom like emoji. NBA Threads users get a basketball emoji, while Book Threads members can heart posts with a stack of books. According to Meta's announcement, active community builders will soon get special profile badges.
But here's what makes this move particularly smart - Meta is essentially formalizing behavior that was already happening organically. Shortly after Threads launched, users started organizing around Topic Tags, which are basically hashtags without the hash symbol. Some tags like "NBA Threads" became unofficial communities long before this official feature existed.
"The feature is designed to let others on the app instantly know what you're about," Meta told TechCrunch. There's no way to hide your community memberships - they're automatically added to your profile as topic tags.
This follows the classic Twitter playbook from the platform's early days. Hashtags, retweets, quote tweets, and mentions all started as user behaviors that Twitter eventually turned into official features. Meta is doing the same thing, which could give Communities better adoption rates than if they'd been imposed from above.
