Threads Enhances Live Chats with New Features and Expanded Access

Meta's Threads is adding new capabilities to its Live Chats feature while expanding access to more users, the company announced on Tuesday. The updates include support for translations, new tools for chat hosts, and more. With support for translations, conversations in chats become more accessible to users around the world.

Threads is also expanding the ability to start Live Chats to all 'Community Champions,' which the company describes as users who are highly followed within their communities, regularly post in those communities, and keep conversations active. Hosts can now also invite up to three co-hosts into their Live Chat to make it easier to manage conversations. Threads says this new capability is the equivalent of having a guest on your show or another voice to moderate a conversation.

Additionally, hosts can now delete messages for everyone, and the platform is testing ways to make host messages appear more visually prominent in chats. When Threads first launched, it struggled to compete with X as a destination for real-time conversations as it lacked key features like robust search, hashtags, and a chronological feed. Since then, Threads has added these capabilities and is now further differentiating itself with Live Chats, a feature designed for real-time engagement that even X doesn't have.

The idea behind Live Chats is to help make Threads feel more timely and relevant. Since the feature's launch, Threads says it has seen hundreds of chats hosted almost daily with thousands of users joining. The features added today are in response to what creators have been requesting, Threads says.

With Live Chats, users can send messages, photos, videos, links, and emoji reactions. Up to 150 participants can actively send messages in a chat. Once this limit is reached, additional users can still view the conversation, react to messages, and participate in polls in 'spectator' mode.

Threads also teased today that desktop support is coming soon and that pinned messages are in the works, both of which have been highly requested by creators. Earlier this month, Threads reached 500 million monthly active users, nearly three years after launching as a competitor to X. Threads has introduced numerous new features over the past year, such as DMs, ghost posts, and desktop messaging, helping drive the platform's growth.

Why this matters: The enhancements to Threads' Live Chats feature mark a significant step in the platform's evolution as a real-time conversation hub. By adding translation support, co-hosting, and moderation tools, Threads is making its Live Chats more accessible, engaging, and manageable. This move is likely to attract more users and creators to the platform, potentially challenging X's dominance in the space.