Threads’ roadmap for integrations with fediverse, aka the network of decentralized applications that includes Twitter/X rival Mastodon and others, has been revealed. A new blog post by Tom Coatescalled the co-founder of an earlier decentralized application Planetarydescribes the events of a December meeting at Meta’s offices, where the Threads team reached out to members of the fediverse community to get feedback on the Instagram-led project to tackle X with a decentralized app that will eventually interoperate with others in the fediverse via the ActivityPub protocol.
The meeting, which Coates described as a “good faith” effort by the Instagram team, laid out the roadmap for Threads integration, starting with the December launch of a feature in the Threads app that would allow their posts to become visible. to Mastodon customers. In fact, Meta began testing the ActivityPub integration back in December, allowing Threads posts to appear on Mastodon. But he only did so with select members of his Instagram team, incl Head of Instagram Adam Mosseriwho is now the the second most watched account on Mastodonjust behind the official Mastodon account, with its 675,606 followers.
At the meeting, the Threads team also shared the next steps for their app as it moves to fediverse, noting that in early 2024 replies posted on the Mastodon servers would become visible in the Threads app, and later in the year, users would be can follow Mastodon accounts within Threads, reply to them and like their posts. However, full interoperability between the two platforms had yet to be determined, Coates said.
The team also discussed how they would approach content moderation as they move forward with the fediverse integration, saying they would block content from the wider fediverse from being visible in the Threads app if it violates their rules. Additionally, this rule could potentially come into play when a user banned from Meta’s platform moved their content to another Mastodon server.
Other questions remain unresolved at this time — such as whether Threads will display third-party Mastodon content in its algorithmic feed, whether it will eventually allow algorithmic opt-in, whether Mastodon content will be visually differentiated from Threads content in some way, and more. The first thing is that moving Threads to fediverse is still a work in progress and the team is actively trying to determine the best path.
One element of the post that was particularly revealing was Coates’ note that he had heard from multiple sources that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believed that Threads should be “completely open” — essentially, that his view was that the open it was the future of social networking. Coates suggested several reasons why Meta might be pursuing this — perhaps to stave off upcoming regulation, or to understand Twitter/X’s place in the zeitgeist as new owner Elon Musk turns it into an everyday app, possibly reducing value of as a fast-paced news network and the home of talk. But it could also be that Zuckerberg is simply predicting where the web is headed.
Nor is he the only techie betting on a decentralized future. Flipboard last month became a federated app with support for ActivityPub. Automattic has also made it possible for all WordPress.org and WordPress.com blogs to integrate, and said it’s working to do the same with Tumblr next year. In addition, both Medium and Mozilla have built their own servers, and the latter also supported a Mastodon client called Mammoth.
Flipboard CEO Mike McCue explained in a conversation with TechCrunch last month that what excited him about Mastodon and ActivityPub was that it wasn’t just about where social media was going, but where the the web itself.
“I saw what was happening with ActivityPub and it became very clear to me that this is the future of the web, period,” McCue said. He likened it to his early days at Netscape, persuading publishers to join the web by building websites. After some time, websites linked to others became what the web is today.
“What we’re talking about with the social web is people linking to pages and people linking to people, so it’s a much more complex web. And that’s the future of the web,” he added.
