References to a communities feature discovered in Meta Threads app code

It's being reported that Meta is working on a new feature for its Threads platform that will mimic competitor community features, such as X Communities or Reddit's subreddits. References to a feature titled "Loops" have been discovered within Threads v352.0.0's coding, with options to both Join and Leave mentioned.

X originally launched its Communities feature back in 2021, when the site was still known as Twitter. Elon Musk has been promoting the feature since his acquisition of the platform, often sharing or resharing posts about its success.

The Loops feature is something that Meta has been testing in Threads for a while, as it was discovered a week ago by Alessandro Paluzzi, with screenshots of how this could work in the future, noting that shortcuts to Loops will eventually be added to the composer and the home header.

Meta hopes that Threads will continue to grow with the addition of these features as it continues to see user growth in its second year. Given that its other services, WhatsApp and Messenger, both have community features already integrated, with the latter having launched back in June 2024, Meta appears to be keen to continue adding this to all of its products.

Meanwhile, Reddit is continuing to utilize its vast array of subreddits to strike deals with AI companies, most notably OpenAI, in May 2024 so that these LLMs can be trained on the content of those communities. On the other hand, it has been blocking other AI training models, such as Microsoft's Bing, from scraping the site for data. Whether Meta uses this approach to train its AI models, such as Llama, based on the content added to Loops in the future remains to be seen.