Thread Users Can Now Follow Mastodon, Other Fediverse Accounts

Meta’s Threads app is continuing to make progress on its ongoing integration with the fediverse. Yesterday, the company announced that Thread users can now follow people on Mastodon and other fediverse servers who have interacted with federated users or posts on Threads. This is a big step towards making the fediverse a truly interconnected network where users across different servers can seamlessly interact with each other.

Until now, Threads users who had enabled sharing to the fediverse could have users on other servers search for their content, interact with it, and follow their profile. Threads also already displayed likes, replies, and followers from other servers.

Threads supports the same decentralized ActivityPub protocol as Mastodon, WordPress, and other decentralized social platforms. With Threads recently crossing 275 million monthly active users, it’s probably the biggest platform to turn this ideal of decentralized social networks into reality. Ironically, Threads is being developed by the Instagram team, and this app very much remains a closed platform.

Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri emphasized yesterday that it wasn’t just possible to follow Mastodon users from Threads and see their posts on their profiles, Threads users can also be notified when Mastodon users post something on their server. “More interop features are on the way, stay tuned,” Mosseri teased yesterday.

Fediverse sharing on Threads is still unavailable for users in the European Region (but not the UK). It also requires users to be 18 or older and to have a public profile. Unfortunately, there’s no interoperability between Threads and Bluesky as the latter is developing its own decentralized social networking protocol. However, Bluesky is probably better at replicating the old-school Twitter experience with a default chronological feed and user lists that can be made public.