Users of Threads could soon have another option for organizing their timelines. According to Adam Mosseri, the app is testing a new archive function that allows users to either manually archive specific posts or have messages automatically hidden after a predetermined amount of time.
Similar to Instagram, Threads archiving conceals a post from public view while preserving the original author’s ability to access and edit the post. According to the director of Instagram, the function would first be accessible to a “small number of people.” Although it’s optional, Mosseri has made it clear that he prefers all posts on the service to have a temporary nature. In a post from February, he stated, “I think we should move to automatically archive posts on Threads after a month or so.”
However, a majority of Threads users said they would “never” want their postings to be automatically removed from public view in a poll that was linked with that previous post. In his most recent report, Mosseri stated that the corporation will initially experiment with archiving “as an option” since “the resounding feedback was not to make this the default.”
While archiving old posts is popular on Instagram, the feature could be somewhat more controversial on Threads. As the service grows and adds more features geared toward real-time information, posts that automatically archive could make it harder to go back and revisit the original source of an update. (If Mosseri, for example, were to automatically archive all his old posts, it would be much more difficult to track his evolving thoughts on Threads, which he often shares publicly on the platform.) At the same time, allowing posts to be ephemeral often encourages users to share more often, which is even more important for Threads’ continued growth.
