Meta’s taking another step with its decentralized social media experiment, with Threads users now able to follow people from other fediverse servers that have interacted with their posts on Threads.
As you can see in this example, shared by Threads chief Adam Mosseri, now, when you get a notification that a fediverse user has replied to your post, you’ll be able to tap through to their fediverse profile and follow them directly within the app.
As per Mosseri:
“You can see their posts by navigating to their profile, and you can also choose to be notified when they post on their server. More interop features are on the way, stay tuned.”
That’s a big step towards facilitating direct interactivity between federated servers, enabling Threads users to engage across other apps built on ActivityPub protocols, which includes Mastodon and WordPress, among others.
It doesn’t, however, include Bluesky, the decentralized social app that’s seen a big surge in users of late, which has spurred Threads into pushing more features to fend off potential competition.
Bluesky is now up to 24 million users, with many influential tech industry folk, in particular, gravitating to the Twitter alternative app.
And theoretically, Threads could have facilitated connection to Bluesky as well through its federated sharing approach, but Bluesky is using AT Protocol, an alternative decentralized network, which doesn’t communicate with ActivityPub.
So while both are decentralized, they can’t currently cross connect. Meaning that you won’t be able to feed your content through to Bluesky via Threads.
But you can share to other federated servers, and now, you can also follow users within these other apps. I’m not sure that this will be a game-changing option, and there’s still a significant pushback against Meta being involved in the fediverse at all, considering that it was one of the main reasons that people sought an alternative social experience in the first place.
But it’s another step in Meta’s decentralized social experiment, which it seems to be doing just in case more people want that option, and it becomes a bigger thing.
I highly doubt that that’s going to ever happen, because the decentralized social approach doesn’t hold appeal to the vast majority of users, who prefer simplicity over control (whether they say so or not). But maybe, if Bluesky does in fact become a thing, decentralized social experiences will get their moment. And then, it could become critically important that Meta’s maintained a connection to this element.
It seems unlikely, but Meta’s already well along this path, and as Mosseri notes, it’ll continue to build on that connection.
But essentially, if all of this doesn’t mean a lot to you, it’s just as likely that it never will either.
