The Threads team at Meta has spent the past year working to support the wider fediverse and social media network, and is now launching its biggest integration yet: a new dedicated feed for fediverse posts and a way to find fediverse users within Threads.
Starting today, if you’ve enabled fediverse sharing in Threads, a new section will appear at the top of your followers feed that takes you to a list of posts by people you follow on Mastodon, Flipboard, or wherever you’ve connected your Threads account. It’s very much like a separate feed, which Meta software engineer Peter Cottle says was done on purpose. “For everything from integrity to user simulation, just to understand the user, it’s nice to have it as a separate thing.” The fediverse feed is not ranked algorithmically, nor does it follow any Threads rules or moderation; it’s just a feed in reverse chronological order of the stuff you follow.
Over time, Cottle says, Meta may mix posts more, but he’s not sure that’s the right idea. “There’s actually a slightly different use case for fediverse,” he says, “it’s more like an old-school RSS reader. “I might want to subscribe to Ghost posts or subscribe to different authors, so I have a dedicated place where I can track content from different sites, separate from the ‘Follow’ or ‘For You’ feed.” According to him, even within Meta, there is a debate about whether Threads wants to be a fully open social network or whether it should only act as a repository for all external content.
When you set up a Federated share, Threads automatically connects to all the accounts you follow, but now you can also search for users on Mastodon and other resources using the Threads search bar. If you follow them, you’ll also start seeing their posts in Threads. This kind of easy discovery has long been one of the biggest challenges for Mastodon, as people are distributed across many separate servers, but Cottle says Threads can do something like a universal search on the fediverse.
This is by far the most visible fediverse content that has ever been on Threads, but the world of ActivityPub is still not a first-class citizen on Threads. You still have to agree to have your posts published, you still have to have a separate account to connect, and you still have to go to a dedicated feed to see what’s new. (If you post something and get replies in Fediverse, those will be separate as well.)
Cottle argues that this separation is useful for understanding different points of view. But it is clear that there is still a lot of work to be done, both in terms of filling the platform with content and presenting it to users in a way they can understand.
In general, Cottle says, there is still a lot of work to be done to educate people about how the federated world works, and even what it is. That’s why Meta has been a little slower to roll out fediverse features, even as the Threads team has been more aggressive in delivering things like DMs, spoiler alerts, and bio links. But Cottle says the team is still committed to merging Threads and fediverse together – whatever that ultimately looks like.
