The integration roadmap for Threads with the fediverse—a decentralized software network that includes Mastodon, a rival to Twitter/X—has been made public. In a recent blog post, co-founder of Planetary, Tom Coates, describes what transpired at a meeting held in December at Meta’s offices. The Threads team had solicited input from the diverse community regarding the Instagram-led project to compete with X with a decentralized app that will eventually communicate with other various apps through the ActivityPub protocol.
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The roadmap for Threads’ diverse integration was outlined in the meeting, which Coates described as a “good faith” effort by the Instagram team. The first step would be launching a feature in December that would enable users’ postings to be seen by Mastodon clients within the Threads app. Indeed, in December, Meta began testing the integration of ActivityPub, allowing Threads posts to show up on Mastodon. However, it did so with a small group of the Instagram staff, including the company’s head, Adam Mosseri, whose 675,606 followers currently rank him second on Mastodon, just behind the official account.
The Threads team also discussed the app’s upcoming steps as it enters the fediverse during the meeting. They revealed that users could follow Mastodon accounts within Threads, reply to them, like their posts later in the year, and see replies posted on Mastodon servers in early 2024. However, according to Coates, the two platforms’ complete compatibility remained in the air.
As they proceeded with the fediverse connection, the team also talked about how they would handle content filtering. They stated that if content from the larger fediverse violates their guidelines, it will not be available in the Threads app. Furthermore, this restriction may apply if a user banned from Meta’s platform moved their content to another Mastodon server.
At this point, there were still several unanswered questions. These included whether or not Threads would eventually allow for algorithmic choice, whether or not third-party Mastodon content would be surfaced in its algorithmic feed, and whether or not Mastodon content would be visually distinguished from Threads content in some way. The lesson is that Threads’ transition to the fediverse is still in the early stages, and the team is actively figuring out the best course of action.
Coates mentioned in the essay that he had heard from several sources that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thought Threads should be “totally open”; in other words, he felt that open was how social networking would go. This was one very telling detail. Coates offered several theories as to why Meta would be doing this, including trying to block impending regulation or assuming Twitter/X’s position in the public consciousness as Elon Musk transforms it into a regular app, thus lessening its utility as a source of breaking news and a forum for discussions. However, it’s also possible that Zuckerberg is speculating about the future course of the internet.
He is hardly the only tech executive placing bets on a decentralized future. Last month, Flipboard underwent federation and gained ActivityPub support. Additionally, Automattic enabled federation for all WordPress.org and WordPress.com blogs, and it announced that it aims to implement a similar feature for Tumblr in the upcoming year. Furthermore, Mozilla and Medium have established their servers, and the latter has also supported a Mastodon user named Mammoth.
Explained Flipboard CEO Mike McCue in a talk with TechCrunch last month; what excited him about Mastodon and ActivityPub was that it wasn’t just about where social media was moving; it was where the web itself was going.
“After observing the developments with ActivityPub, I was convinced that this is how the web will develop going forward,” McCue stated. He compared it to his early work at Netscape, where he created websites to persuade publishers to join the online community. Web pages that linked to other pages eventually evolved into the modern internet.
The social web we are discussing is far more complex because individuals are linking to pages and relating to each other. Thus, it represents the web’s future,” he continued.
(Information Source: Techcrunch.com)
