Meta is testing messaging capabilities with Threads, but don’t call them DMs

As Threads has more than 130 million users, one of the main “missing” features that users often complain about is the lack of direct messaging. But people who miss DMs may soon have a new option to send messages to other Threads users.

Meta is launching a messaging feature that relies on the Instagram inbox, but allows new messages to be initiated from the Threads app. The feature has begun to roll out to some Threads users, who reported seeing a “Messages” button above other users’ profiles that turned out to be a “Mentions” feature. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the change, saying the company is “testing the ability to send messages to Instagram from Threads.”

It’s worth noting that Threads still doesn’t have its own inbox, and it’s not clear if it will. Instagram head Adam Mosseri has said multiple times that he doesn’t want to create an app for Threads, but rather “make the Instagram inbox work.” A Meta spokesperson further confirmed, “This is not a test of DM on Threads.”

But while it’s not a full-blown DM feature, the ability to send messages from the Threads app without switching to Instagram would at least make Threads messaging less clunky. However, actually viewing or replying to these messages still requires users to go to the Instagram app.

This still seems like a completely unnecessary step, but Mosseri points out that building two versions of the same inbox can easily get complicated. “If we ultimately can’t make the Instagram inbox work with Threads, we’ll be faced with a tough choice: (1) mirror the Instagram inbox in Threads and handle the notification routing weirdness, (2) build a completely separate thread for the inbox. mailbox, and deal with the fact that you’ll be using the same handle with each of your friends in two different apps, having two redundant message threads,” he wrote in November. “It doesn’t look good.”