Threads Enables Fediverse Sharing in More than 100 Countries

Meta is doubling down on its support for open social networking by enabling fediverse sharing on Threads in more than 100 countries. This means that Threads users who are 18 and over with public profiles can now share their posts on other fediverse-compatible platforms such as Mastodon and WordPress, where users will be able to interact with these posts without needing a Threads profile.

Threads is Meta’s first app to support fediverse sharing through the open social networking protocol ActivityPub. And it’s a stark contrast to Meta’s other closed platforms like Facebook and Instagram. But the same goes for other popular social networks such as X (formerly Twitter) or Reddit, which are incentivized to keep users in their walled gardens… so they can see ads.

If Facebook and Instagram are filled with ads these days, Threads doesn’t have any ads yet. The app has been designed as a Twitter killer by the Instagram team, but with fediverse sharing, Meta may be trying to attract a different audience. People that care about open protocols and platforms that can communicate together. It’s quite an idealistic goal that goes against how large social media platforms built massive and captive audiences over the past 20 years.

Word of the week: fediverse, a global social network of interconnected servers that allows people to communicate across different platforms. pic.twitter.com/HsOfgSYYxE

— Meta Newsroom (@MetaNewsroom) June 25, 2024

“With open social networking, people using fediverse-compatible servers will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads profile, and vice versa, connecting communities,” the company explained today. “Developers can build new types of features and user experiences that can easily plug into other open social networks, accelerating the pace of innovation and experimentation. This will give people more choice when it comes to reaching new audiences, expanding their communities, and joining public discussions on topics they care about.”

As of today, fediverse sharing on Threads comes with some limitations. Threads users who enabled fediverse sharing can see replies on their posts coming from fediverse-compatible servers, but they can’t reply to them. Changes made on posts on Threads may also not affect other servers where they’ve been distributed. “For example, when you delete a post, it’ll no longer be visible on Threads and Threads will ask other servers to delete it, but the post may still be visible,” the company explained on a support page.

Earlier this month, Meta also launched the Threads public API, which means that developers can create third-party applications to publish posts, reply to others, see insights, and more. Overall, Meta is making some unprecedented moves to support open social networking, but there’s probably little chance that we’ll see other established social platforms do the same.