Instagram Threads Won’t Reveal Timeline for Account Migration

According to TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez, Meta has yet to announce whether or not account portability features would be included in its roadmap and federation plans for Instagram Threads. A Meta spokeswoman told TechCrunch that such capabilities were “top of mind” for the firm, but declined to provide any other details regarding a future plan.

Will Meta’s Instagram Threads genuinely interface with the fediverse, commonly known as the open social network, allowing users to interact with individuals on other platforms such as Mastodon and switch their accounts elsewhere if they believe Meta’s policies are no longer acceptable? Today, the answer is still unclear. Meta has yet to disclose whether account portability features would be added to its roadmap and federation ambitions for the newer social network.

When asked about the status of Threads’ account portability efforts, a Meta spokeswoman claimed the plans were “top of mind” but declined to give any details about the future roadmap.

Meta’s choice to not emphasize account portability in the immediate future comes at a critical juncture for the tech firm. The company recently announced the discontinuation of its fact-checking program in favour of a crowdsourced Community Notes feature similar to X’s, as well as relaxed content moderation policies. According to Platformer, it is also turning off a system that penalizes misinformation by ranking it lower on its platforms. These changes may cause users to reconsider their connection with Meta, and possibly explore moving their accounts to other services, which Threads has stated it intends to allow eventually.

At the same time, Gen Z users are so fed up with Meta’s monopoly on social media that, rather of returning to Instagram Reels in anticipation of TikTok’s ban in the United States, they have migrated en masse to RedNote (Xiaohongshu), another Chinese social network. As of this week, about 700,000 TikTok users had joined RedNote while also making jokes on TikTok about saying goodbye to their “Chinese spy.”

Threads was intended to symbolize Meta’s shift away from competing with the open social web and toward joining it. To date, there has been substantial debate about whether Meta’s entry into the fediverse, an open social network driven by the ActivityPub protocol, was done in good faith. Critics have expressed fears that Meta was just attempting to dominate the open web by quickly establishing itself as the largest federated client, granting it power over the fediverse’s future path.

Nonetheless, Meta has continued to push out many connections with the fediverse on Threads, such as the ability to cross-post to Mastodon and view responses from Mastodon users within Threads. It’s also done a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of user education by putting guidelines and explainers about the fediverse in the Threads app and online.

However, one of the most important steps toward becoming a federated app is to enable account portability. That means if you don’t like how your federated server is operating, you may move your account elsewhere without losing your followers, bookmarks, lists, and other information.

Meta representatives and members of the fediverse community met in December 2023, and Meta acknowledged that part of what spurred its migration to the fediverse in the first place were users’ concerns about the idea that Meta effectively “owned” someone’s followers. (While the meeting was not recorded, community members who attended were allowed to share what was discussed as long as they did not directly quote or attribute statements to specific Meta members.)

Attendee Tom Coates summarized the conversation, stating that Meta expressed a desire to integrate with the fediverse in order to answer consumers’ concerns about their social network.

“They were looking for the ability to know that if they needed to, they could move elsewhere,” Coates wrote, admitting that it “didn’t feel like the whole story.”

Given Meta’s big policy change on fact-checking and moderating, it seemed like a good time to check in on its fediverse agenda, especially as there is no indication that the business has initiated work on this feature.

When approached for a roadmap update on account portability, a Meta spokesman could not confirm whether the matter was even on the Threads roadmap, let alone when it would be addressed.

Instead, they stated that account transference was “top of mind as we continue our fediverse integration,” with “no additional details on the roadmap or timing at the moment.”

While Threads may still seek to implement account portability in the future, it is reasonable to assume that it is not a priority for the time being because the firm wants to keep its users on Threads. The social network has expanded to become the largest federated app (if fully federated), with 300 million monthly active users, up from 275 million in November. It also boasts 100 million daily active users.

The article as reported by Techcrunch was changed after publication to include the right amount of TikTok users adopting RedNote, which is 700,000, not 700 million.