You Can Finally Change Your Default Channel in Themes
It’s finally here: Threads officially lets you choose a default feed to see when you open the app, whether it’s Subscriptions or a custom feed you’ve created yourself. This means that when you open Threads, you’ll be able to view messages from the accounts you choose to follow, instead of seeing what the algorithm wants you to do. Meta has been testing this feature for several months and is now making it available to everyone – in addition to several other new features.
How to change the default topic feed to Subscriptions
The default process for changing your feed is simple. Follow these steps:
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Open the Threads app on your phone and go to the Home tab.
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You’ll see all your channels in different tabs at the top of the screen, just below the Threads logo. Touch and hold any of these channels and select Edit Channels .
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This will show all your channels in a list. Hold any channel here and drag it up or down to reorder the list. The first one in the list will automatically become your new default channel.
Feel free to set it to Subscriptions or any custom channel you created. Please note that this feature is rolling out slowly, so it may take some time before you see it on your phone.
Other theme updates
In the same update, Threads added some more useful features to the app. My personal favorite is the new video player, which finally has basic playback controls and a progress bar that you can easily access. There is a new play/pause button between the fast forward and rewind buttons. You can use these buttons to go backwards or forwards 10 seconds at a time. A progress bar appears below each video and is large enough to view the video. This is a big change: without these features, watching videos in Threads often felt like watching looping GIFs.
You can also limit replies and quotes to your posts. When you create a new post in Topics, click the Everyone can reply and quote button located to the left of the Publish button. This allows you to limit replies and quotes to your followers, mentioned accounts, or accounts you follow.
Separately, Meta is testing the ability to add up to 10 topics to your Threads profile. Clicking on these topics leads you to conversations about these topics, similar to how hashtags work on other social media platforms. When you create a new post in Topics, you may see a button that allows you to add the current topic to the post. If you use it, your post will be able to reach a wider audience than usual.