Despite the brutal user drop after the initial surge, Mark Zuckerberg is not letting go of Threads. Now, the Meta mastermind is announcing something new is in the testing stage: something that’ll give users interoperability (via Reuters).
Here’s what Zuckerberg is saying:
Starting a test where posts from Threads accounts will be available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol. Making Threads interoperable will give people more choice over how they interact and it will help content reach more people. I’m pretty optimistic about this.
The plans for Threads to be compatible with Mastodon or other services that use the ActivityPub protocol are not new, in fact, they were shared with the public as early as the Twitter clone came to life in mid-2023.
“We are working toward making Threads compatible with the open, interoperable social networks that we believe can shape the future of the internet”, Meta said back in July.
Now, they’re going in that direction with the current interoperability testing, but no further details are shared.
What is Mastodon?
Mastodon is a free, ad-free and open-source social network that’s self-hosted and takes privacy and customization to heart. “Instant global communication is too important to belong to one company. Each Mastodon server is a completely independent entity, able to interoperate with others to form one global social network”, says the Mastodon homepage.
Back in July, when Threads was launched, Mastodon CEO and founder Eugen Rochko wrote a lengthy blog post on the topic.
Here’s an excerpt from the article that Q&A-like:
Will a large platform like Meta joining Mastodon overwhelm smaller servers?
Mastodon works primarily through follow relationships. When you follow a user on another server for the first time, your server subscribes to that user specifically. That means even if there is a server with millions of people in the network, unless you follow millions of people, you will not be receiving updates for millions of people. This keeps traffic and storage manageable across the network. As such, small servers will not be affected, and may not even notice the presence of Threads, except when they decide to follow specific users.
