coates

Upcoming Feature: Follow Mastodon Users through Threads by the End of the Year – Insights from the Meta Meeting

Threads Gettyimages 1524134312 1
Threads’ roadmap for integrations with the fediverse, aka the network of decentralized apps that includes Twitter/X rival Mastodon and others, has been revealed. In the meeting, which Coates characterized as a “good faith” effort by the Instagram team, the roadmap for Threads’ fediverse integration was laid out, starting with a December launch of a feature within the Threads app that would allow their posts to become visible to Mastodon clients. Meta did, in fact, start testing ActivityPub integration in December, allowing Threads posts to appear on Mastodon. In addition, this rule would potentially come into play when a user banned from Meta’s platform moved their content to another Mastodon server. Other questions remained unresolved at this time — like whether Threads would surface third-party Mastodon content in its algorithmic feed, whether it would ultimately allow for algorithmic choice, whether Mastodon content would be made to appear visually differentiated from Threads’ content in some way, and more.