It’s official. Meta’s Threads is finally testing integration with ActivityPub, the same service that supports Mastodon, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday. That means Meta is one step closer to fulfilling its initial promise to make Threads compatible with the open social networking protocol that houses platforms like Mastodon.
“Making Threads interoperable will give people more choice over how they interact and it will help content reach more people,” Zuckerberg said in a Threads post. “I’m pretty optimistic about this.” Meta did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
This also means the fediverse, what could be the next phase of the internet, is one step closer to going mainstream. Should that happen, it could connect brands looking to be culturally relevant with the new, untapped communities of the fediverse — something that’s become more important to marketers in light of Elon Musk’s turbulent takeover of Twitter, now X.
As a refresher, ActivityPub is designed to facilitate the fediverse, an ad-free, community-owned series of decentralized social networks. (Read our WTF is the fediverse explainer here.) Thus far, the likes of Tumblr, Flipboard, Medium, Mozilla and, now, Meta are working with ActivityPub.
What you need to know
- In addition to opening Threads to European countries, Zuckerberg announced Wednesday Meta’s newest social media platform is beginning a test in which posts from Threads will be available on Mastodon and other services that use ActivityPub protocol.
- Meta launched Threads, its answer to a flailing X, back in July with the promise to make the new text-based social media platform compatible with ActivityPub, an open, decentralized social networking protocol. It’s one step closer to making good on that promise.
- Starting this week, people with accounts on Mastodon and other platforms that support ActivityPub will be able to follow Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, and a few others from the Meta team. Testing doesn’t appear to have rolled out to general Threads users yet.
Threads in the fediverse
It’s a plan that’s been in the works since Threads’ inception that Meta has been chipping away at, according to Meta’s press blog. Back in August, Threads inched closer to its goal after rolling out the ability to verify links to Threads profiles on platforms like Mastodon. Effectively, this latest move would allow Threads users to transfer content among other platforms that are using ActivityPub. For example, a post on Threads could theoretically appear on Mastodon, should all go according to plan.
As it stands now, each social media platform is its own gated community. Meaning, what happens on Facebook stays on Facebook, what happens on X stays on X, and so on. As far as major social media networks are concerned, Meta is a first-mover here, opening up the aperture for the next generation of social media, where content flows more freely from platform to platform. That’s not to say platforms are totally landlocked.