Threads gets its own DMs as app distances itself from Instagram

Instagram Threads is rolling out users’ most-requested feature to date: the ability to message people directly, without having to switch to another app, like Instagram. The company said direct messages (DMs) will begin rolling out to users globally beginning on Tuesday, alongside a new visual element called highlighter.

The latter will emphasize interesting perspectives and conversations, Meta says, starting with Trending Topics.

At launch, Threads DMs offer a basic set of features. They’ll support one-on-one chats, preset emoji reactions, the ability to report spam, and mute DMs (as on Instagram). Other features, like group messaging, inbox filters, and more advanced message controls, will arrive in a later release.

That means today, you can’t block a follower or mutual from messaging you — you can only block them on Threads, which will also block them on Instagram. To control who can message you, you have to choose whether or not you follow the user.

At launch, DMs will be available for users 18 and up in most markets where Threads is available, except for Japan, Australia, the U.K., and the EU.

With the addition of DMs, Threads becomes more competitive with other text-first social apps like X and Bluesky, where users can engage with one another directly or even in group chats, as in X’s case.

However, while X is working on encrypted direct messages within X Chat, Threads has no intention of tightly securing its private messaging feature.

“We’re not encrypting our DMs,” said Emily Dalton Smith, Threads VP of Product. “It’s really about just connecting directly and talking to people about whatever is happening now, which I think makes encryption less core to the experience.”

Instead, she said that DMs are meant to build on the community that people have created in the public space on Threads — a network that’s shaping up to be entirely different from its parent app, Instagram, Smith pointed out.

“One thing that’s been particularly exciting is that we have seen that people are building their own graphs on Threads,” she said. “They’re building up what we think of as an interest graph that is new and distinct from the social graph that underlies their account on Instagram.”

Despite having been built on top of Instagram’s social graph, over a third of the people who come to Threads daily have less than a 50% overlap between their Instagram connections and Threads connections, Meta said.

“Instagram is really for creativity and Threads is really for perspectives,” Smith noted.

The company also found that users are following different sets of people across Instagram and Threads and are engaging in different interests and conversations.

Because of this growing disconnect between the apps, Meta aims to test other ways for people to use Threads without an Instagram account.

For instance, it’s testing the ability for users to log in with their Facebook account (in Europe) or create a Threads-only account. It’s also testing the ability to use Threads from the web while not logged in at all.

The Threads creator community is unique, too. Although it may include those who are popular creators on other platforms, some have become creators on Threads itself. One example is David Rushing, a passionate fan who built up the NBA Threads community.

Smith said Threads would like to make it easier for its users to find communities like this and others, and this is an important part of the app’s upcoming roadmap.

On this front, Threads initially introduced tags (like hashtags without the hash # symbol) to organize conversations. It then created topic feeds so you could see everything that was being discussed around that area of interest. Now the focus will be on identifying the people who are active and top contributors within a community.

Threads expects to show more suggested users to follow in search and recommendations over the next couple of months, Smith said.

The new highlight feature could also help here.

While today, the feature will highlight trending topics related to the content you are reading while scrolling your For You feed, over time, Threads could highlight perspectives from users or active conversations that you might want to jump into, including within various topic feeds.

There are currently no other plans to monetize Threads beyond ads, Smith confirmed, even though Meta has an AI feature that could be integrated into the experience the way xAI’s AI chatbot, Grok, is used to sell X Premium subscriptions.

Instead, Meta is first focused on getting ads right, while using AI to power things in the background, like trending topics’ headlines and summaries, for instance.

That doesn’t mean the team will rule out AI features further down the road.

“We consider, probably, all ideas,” Smith said, “but we’re really just building on what our community tells us and trying to prioritize such a small and growing app.”

Threads is not small, to be clear; the app has 350 million monthly active users, far more than newcomers like Bluesky, which has 37 million registered users. But compared with Meta’s family of apps, where user bases are counted in billions, Threads still has much to prove to its corporate parent.

Ahead of the global launch, DMs were tested earlier this month in a few markets, including Hong Kong, Thailand, Argentina, and Brazil.