The Threads team at Meta has spent the past year working on supporting the broader fediverse and social web, and is launching its biggest integrations yet: a new dedicated feed for fediverse posts, and a way to search for fediverse users inside of Threads.
Starting today, if you’ve turned on fediverse sharing in Threads, there will be a new section at the top of your Following feed that takes you to a list of posts from folks you follow on Mastodon, Flipboard, or wherever else you’ve connected your Threads account. It’s very much a separate feed, which Meta software engineer Peter Cottle tells me is deliberate. “For everything from integrity to user impersonation, just for user understanding, it’s nice to have it as kind of a separate thing.” The fediverse feed isn’t algorithmically ranked, or subject to any of Threads’ rules or moderation; it’s just a reverse-chronological feed of stuff you follow.
Over time, Cottle says, Meta could mix the posts more, but he’s not sure that’s the right idea. “There’s actually kind of a different use case for fediverse consumption,” he says, that’s more like old-school RSS readers. “I might want to subscribe to Ghost publications, or subscribe to different authors, so I have this dedicated place to catch up on my across-the-web content, separately from a Following feed or a For You feed.” Even internally at Meta, he says, there’s some debate about whether Threads wants to be a fully open social network or should just act as a repository for all that external content.
When you set up fediverse sharing, Threads automatically connects to whatever accounts you’ve followed, but you can also now search for users on Mastodon and elsewhere from the Threads search bar. If you follow them, you’ll start to see their posts in Threads too. This kind of easy discovery has long been one of the biggest challenges for Mastodon in particular, since people are distributed across so many separate servers, but Cottle says Threads can do something like universal fediverse search.
This is certainly the most visible fediverse content has ever been inside of Threads, but the world of ActivityPub is still not a first-class citizen inside of Threads. You still have to opt-in to sharing your posts, you still have to have a separate account to connect to, and you’ll still have to go to the dedicated feed to see what’s new. (If you post something and get fediverse replies, those are still separate too.)
Cottle argues that this separation is a useful way to understand different perspectives. But it seems clear there’s just still a lot of work to be done both on bringing content into the platform and on showing it to users in a way that makes sense.
In general, Cottle says, there’s still a lot of work to be done educating people on how the fediverse works, and even what it is in the first place. That’s why Meta has been a bit slower in rolling out fediverse features, even as the Threads team has more aggressively shipped things like DMs, spoiler alerts, and links in bio. But Cottle says the team is still committed to bringing Threads and the fediverse together — whatever that ends up looking like.