Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko praises Threads’ entry into the decentralized social media space, telling the motion will do Mastodon — the open-source Twitter/X competitor — “a much more attractive option.” The Mastodon app, which is powered by the decentralized social networking protocol ActivityPub, has gained more attention following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, a network that has since been renamed X to reflect Musk’s ambitions to turn the microblogging platform into an all-in-one app for creators, payments, videos, live audio and shopping.
Those unhappy with Twitter’s changes are looking to other platforms, including Mastodon, an open-source alternative, as well as challengers from other startups like Spill, Spoutible, Post, Bluesky and others. But with Instagram entering the ‘Twitter clone’ space, things changed once again. Now there’s a Twitter alternative with Meta’s big resources behind it, which helped it grow to nearly 100 million monthly active users just three months after launch. Mastodon today has just 1.5 million monthly activesfor comparison.
Most importantly for Mastodon, Meta has committed to integrating Threads with ActivityPub, meaning users will be able to find and follow both Mastodon and Threads users on both services. While many expected the integration not to arrive until early 2024, Meta surprised everyone by announcing yesterday that it will begin testing ActivityPub integration.
“Making Threads interoperable will give people more choices about how to interact and help content reach more people. I’m pretty optimistic about that,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a Threads post.
Zuckerberg didn’t explain how the integration would work, but Rochko cleared up the confusion with a post on Mastodon where he said that federation — that is, connecting Threads to the broader pool of servers running decentralized social networking apps — was “one way for now .” This means that Mastodon users can follow “a select few” Threads user profiles — like Instagram chief Adam Mosseri — in Mastodon, but the reverse is not yet true.
Thread user profiles on Mastodon were not populated with their older posts before the integration went live. Instead, profiles will show posts from that point onwards, with a message instructing you that “older posts from other servers are not shown”. A link to “browse more on original profile” will take users to Threads.
Rochko was largely positive about tech giant ActivityPub’s embrace of decentralized social media, saying earlier“The fact that major platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only a validation of the move toward decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into those platforms to switch to better providers.”
Mastodon’s founder also downplayed concerns that Meta’s entry could lead to “embrace-extend-extinguish’ condition for the ActivityPub protocol — a reference to how large companies enter markets with existing standards and then extend those standards with proprietary capabilities to stifle competition.
“…even if Threads were to abandon ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now,” Rochko pointed out in a blog post this summer.
Image Credits: Eugen Rochko in Mastodon
As the integration goes live, Rochko hailed the move as “exciting” and “huge for Mastodon,” saying a post on the platform that it’s a “step toward the interoperable social web we’ve been advocating for.”
Furthermore, points out that access to all Threads users from one Mastodon account makes the app more attractive, considering its other perks.
The same argument is made by Mastodon’s third-party client, Mozilla-backed Mammoth, which believes its app will offer a competitive user interface that will be more accessible to newcomers to decentralized social media and a viable alternative to Threads. . including users who do not want to create a Meta account. While Threads has distanced itself from news, saying it would not “amplify” news on its platform, Mammoth has embraced news partnerships and curation, which it expects may appeal to those ditching Twitter/X for other apps.
By integrating Threads into the Mastodon ecosystem, users will have more options for how they want to interact with Threads users and content, including accessing those accounts from an app of their choice.
