Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today that the company’s social network Threads will finally begin testing a DM (direct message) inbox that’s separate from users’ Instagram DM Inboxes. This means Threads users won’t have to use Instagram or switch apps to chat with someone on the platform.
The company will initially test this feature in limited geographies, including Hong Kong, Thailand, and Argentina, with plans to roll it out in other locations soon. The chat feature is currently limited to one-on-one conversations, not group messages.
This will likely be seen as a positive development for Meta’s newest social network. As TechCrunch previously noted, many people have a different set of followers on Threads than they do on Instagram. Plus, there’s a chance that some number of Threads users don’t often use their Instagram accounts, if they use the app at all.
Instagram has been thinking of how to approach Threads DMs for some time.
Last year, the company was working on a prototype that allowed users to send a message to their Instagram inbox directly from the Threads app.
In 2023, Instagram head Adam Mosseri also said that the social network hoped to make the Instagram inbox work for Threads. His thinking at the time was that people have similar followings on both social networks, which is not always true.
When Threads debuted in July 2023, it was heavily dependent on Instagram’s network effects, with features that immediately connected Instagram users with their friends and other creators. But after more than 20 months of existence, the company realized that people were forming different kinds of networks on Threads, due to its public nature and similarities with other short-form apps like X and Bluesky.
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Meta said that it decided to create a separate DM inbox feature because Threads users were asking for a way to have one-on-one conversations without having to switch apps.
While it’s good that Threads finally made a DM inbox available, the company is late in rolling it out.
Its rival social network Bluesky introduced DMs in May 2024. Meta’s announcement also comes just a few days after Elon Musk-owned X released a new XChat feature with support for group messages, vanishing mode, and file sharing, to improve on DMs.
