Now, this may be something, or it may be nothing, or at least not what some are expecting.
In May, app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi discovered elements of Threads’ backend code that referenced a section called “Your Feeds.”
As you can see from this example, “Your Feed” gives users easy access to different elements of your app, including the main “Following” feed, the list of saved posts, and liked posts.
Some people got excited about this and predicted that this would be the home for a variable feed algorithm, allowing you to manage your own in-app experience, or that lists could switch to alternative thread feeds based on different topic-based user groups.
However, the Threads team denied the discovery, saying that this is simply another way to access these elements.
But it’s still a work in progress.
As you can see in new screenshots shared by Radu Oncescu, Threads is still developing the UI for these alternative “feeds,” which still only give you access to posts you’ve liked or saved.
But this does seem like an opportunity to further customize the Threads experience.
Currently, the desktop version of the app lets you set up “Recommended,” “Following,” “Search” strings, “Activity,” and a profile, in addition to a stream of likes and saved posts.
The “Your Feeds” view within the app will remain essentially the same, but Threads may also implement list functionality, giving you more ways to interact with different topic elements, and potentially even a custom algorithmic timeline based on the algorithm you choose.
But both seem unlikely, or at least not a big focus for the Threads team.
In February, Instagram Chief Executive Adam Mosseri said that lists were in the blueprints for features the company would build on the app, but that he didn’t think it would be as big a deal as people might think.
“In my humble opinion, all of the requested features like Lists, Edit button, Following feed, Trends, Hashtags, etc. are good to build, but none of them will noticeably increase threads or thread usage. It’s good to build features that your most engaged users are looking forward to, but it’s hard to prioritize them when the measurable impact is negligible, so we’ll keep building them.“
So it seems like the list is coming, and would fit perfectly with this new display, but it might not be coming anytime soon.
As for mutable algorithms, which have become a key tenet of the new wave of decentralized social apps, this also seems to fit into Threads’ broader vision in aligning with fediverse sharing, but there are a lot of complexities here that I don’t think are feasible for the Threads team yet.
Even if this were the case, I doubt the majority of users would actually be interested unless the variable feed algorithm was easily explained and implemented.
It’s possible that this display could fit here, but at this point it’s unclear if this is more than just a placeholder UI and could become anything, and it could also just be a mobile version of the web functionality.
So feel free to read on, but I don’t think this is the list/alternative algorithm function you’re looking for, at least at this point in time.
