Meta’s transition to the open social web, also known as the fediverse, is confusing. Does Facebook’s owner see open protocols as the future? Will do embrace the fediverse just to shut it down, shifting people back to its proprietary platforms and decimating the startups building in the space? Will he bring his advertising empire to the fediverse, where today clients like Mastodon and others remain ad-free?
A possible answer may come from a conversation between two Meta employees who work on Threads and Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, whose company joined the fediverse with its support of ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon and others.
On McCue’s “Flipboard Dot Social.” podcast, spoke with two leaders building the Threads experience, director of product management Rachel Lambert and software engineer Peter Cottle. McCue raised questions and concerns shared by others working on fediverse projects, including what Meta’s involvement means for this space and whether Meta would eventually abandon Threads and fediverse, leaving a broken ecosystem in its wake.
Lambert responded by pointing out that Meta has other open source efforts in the works, so “pulling the lid” on its busy work would have a “very high cost” to the company, as it would be detrimental to Meta’s work trying to build. trust with other open source communities.
For example, the company releases some of its work on large language models (LLM) as open source products, such as Llama.
Additionally, he believes that Meta will be able to continue to build trust over time with those working in the fediverse by releasing features and hitting milestones, as it recently did with the release of the new switch that allows Threads users to post their their posts to the wider fediverse, where they can be viewed in Mastodon and other applications.
But more importantly, McCue (and all of us) wanted to know: Why is Meta involved in the fediverse in the first place?
Meta today has 3.24 billion people use its social apps daily, according to Q1 2024 earnings. Does it really need a few million more?
Lambert indirectly answered this question by explaining the use case for Threads as a place for real-time public conversations. He suggested that linking to fediverse would help users find a wider audience than they could reach on Threads alone.
This is only true to a point, however. While fediverse is active and growing, Threads is already a dominant application in the space. Outside of Threads’ more than 150 million monthly active users, the wider federation just north of 10 million users. Mastodon, a leading federal application, is down below 1 million monthly active users after starting Threads.
So if Threads that unites the fediverse isn’t about greatly expanding the reach of creators, then what is the goal of Meta?
Comments from Meta employees hinted at a broader reason behind Meta’s shift to the fediverse.
Bringing the creator economy to the open social web
Image Credits: After
Lambert suggests that by joining fediverse, creators on Threads have the opportunity to “own their audience in ways they can’t in other apps today.”
But this isn’t just about account portability. it’s also about creators and their revenue streams potentially leaving Meta’s walled garden. If creators wanted to leave Meta for other social apps where they had more direct relationships with fans, there are still few significant options outside of TikTok and YouTube.
If these creators joined the fediverse—perhaps to escape their Meta survival—Threads users would still benefit from their content. (Slogan”Hotel California“).
Later in the podcast, Cottle expands on how this could be done at the protocol level as well, if creators offered their followers the ability to pay for access to their content.
“You could imagine an extension to the protocol eventually — saying, ‘I want to support micropayments’ or … like, ‘Hey, feel free to show me ads if that supports you.’ Sort of like a way to label yourself or self-select. That would be great,” noted Cottle, speaking casually. Whether or not Meta would find a way to cut these micropayments, of course, remains to be seen.
McCue floated the idea that different users could become creators where some of their content would only be available to subscribers, similar to how Patreon works. For example, advocate and co-editor of ActivityPub Evan Prodromou created a paid Mastodon account (@evanplus@prodromou.pub) to which users could subscribe for $5 per month to gain access. If he is ready with paid content, surely others would follow. Cottle agreed that the model could work with the feds as well.
He further suggested that there are ways the federated group could generate revenue beyond donations, which often fuels various efforts today, such as Mastodon. Cottle said one could even make a different experience that consumers would pay for, the way some different client apps are paid for today.
“Servers are not free to run. And ultimately, someone has to find a way to … bear the cost of doing business,” he pointed out. Could Meta be considering a paid federated experience like Medium started?
Monitoring services at the protocol level
The podcast provided another possible answer as to what Meta might be working on in the space, with a suggestion that she could bring her expertise in tuning to the ActivityPub protocol.
“A lot of the tools we have for people to feel safe and feel like they can personalize their experience are pretty crude today. So you can block users… you can block at the server level overall, which is a really big action, but you’re missing some other tools there that are a little bit more like proportional response,” Lambert explained.
Today, different users can’t do things like filter their followers or respond to offensive content or behavior in the same way as on Instagram. “This would be great for us to develop more as a standard at the protocol level,” he added. (Note, Threads just released word, phrase, and emoji filtering and added tools to mute notifications and controls for offer posts.)
Still, Lambert said that whatever work Meta does he wouldn’t expect everyone in the fediverse to adopt their own toolkit.
Image Credits: Automatic
“We’ve built our technology around a set of policies, and our policies are informed by many different elements from civil rights groups, policy stakeholders and just our company values, in general. So we certainly wouldn’t want to assume that this is now the standard within the fediverse for how to moderate, but making these tools more available so that people have that option seems like a really exciting route from our point of view”.
Meta’s design is also very similar to Bluesky’s concept stackable monitoring serviceswhere third parties can provide moderation services over Bluesky either as independent projects by individuals or communities or even as paid subscription products.
Perhaps Meta, too, sees a future where its existing moderation capabilities become a product of subscription revenue to the wider open social web.
Finally, Lambert described a differentiated user experience where you could more easily track the conversations taking place around a post across multiple servers.
“I think that combined with the tools that allow you to personalize that experience will … help people feel more secure and in control,” he said.
