Move over, Twitter: 6 Threads features that Elon Musk’s platform lacks

Lets you restrict profiles

If you want to take a break from someone on social media without them knowing, then blocking or unfollowing them may not be the best choice. Instagram offers a middle ground between muting and blocking someone in a process called ‘restricting.’

“When you restrict someone, you won’t receive any more notifications about that person including if they like, reply to, repost or quote your content,” says Threads. Twitter does not offer a feature like this at the moment, although you can still manually mute people so that they do not appear on your timeline.

Reminder to take a break

Take a break feature on Threads. (Express image)

Social media is designed to be addictive with its endless scrolling feeds and microblogging platforms like Threads and Twitter are no different. However, Threads may be a step ahead in curbing doom-scrolling. It comes with a feature called ‘Take a break’ which users can access via their account settings on the app. With it, you can set reminders to take a break after every 10, 20, or 30 minutes spent on the app. Twitter lacks a feature like this at the moment.

Option to pause notifications temporarily

Pause all notifications feature on Threads. (Express image)

Notifications can be annoying sometimes, more so on Threads if you’ve just created an account. To address this, Threads lets users pause notifications for set periods of time. You can pause notifications for up to 8 hours if they get too irritating. Twitter doesn’t offer a feature like this but you can always turn off app notifications from your phone’s settings, although you’d have to turn them back on manually if you’d want to.

Add posts directly to Instagram Story

Another obvious advantage of being tied to Instagram is the ability to post your or others’ threads directly as Stories on Instagram, which is super handy for sharing memes. On Twitter, you’d have to use the old-fashioned way of taking a screenshot and then posting it on your Story.

Easy peasy sign-up

Threads lets you sign up at the tap of a button and goes as far as importing your username, bio, followers, and other data from Instagram – registration was never this easy. That’s an obvious advantage of being a chip off Instagram. Meanwhile, the easiest way to sign up on Twitter is through your Google or Apple account.

More goodies on the way

In a Threads post last week, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri promised that several “obvious missing features” that will help the app compete better with Twitter will be added soon. That includes a timeline that shows posts from people you follow, a button to edit posts, and the ability to search for posts. The ability to edit posts will be an especially important feature and may even be a jab at Twitter considering Twitter has restricted it to paid Blue subscribers only. Still, it’s undeniable that at its current state, Twitter has a huge edge over Threads feature-wise…it’s not even close.