Threads Expands Fediverse Integration with Feeds and Profile Search

Instagram Threads, Meta’s rival to X, unveiled two new features Tuesday as part of its strategy to further its integration with the fediverse, or open social web. If a Threads user has chosen to share on the fediverse, they will now be able to view posts from other users in a certain feed. Additionally, fediverse users will be easily searchable in Threads.

The Meta Threads team has been working over the past year to support the larger fediverse and social web. They unveiled their largest integrations to date, which include a new feed just for fediverse posts and a feature that allows users to search for other fediverse users within Threads.

Now, if you have enabled fediverse sharing in Threads, a new area at the top of your Following feed will direct you to a list of postings from people you follow on Flipboard, Mastodon, or any other platform where you have linked your Threads account. Peter Cottle, a Meta software engineer, tells me that this is intentional because it’s a really distinct feed. “It’s nice to have it as sort of a separate thing for everything from integrity to user impersonation, just for user understanding.” The fediverse feed is merely a reverse-chronological feed of the content you follow; it is not algorithmically graded or subject to any of Threads’ rules or moderation.

You can find posts from federated users on the Threads app’s Following tab. However, they don’t show up alongside the other postings made by Threads users. To see these posts in a different feed, you will instead tap on a link at the top of the feed.

Posts from federated apps such as Mastodon, Bookwyrm, WriteFreely, and others can be pulled into Threads; other services will be added in the future.

Users will see the top-level posts from the fediverse in this feed, but they won’t be able to respond just yet, according to Threads engineer Peter Cottle. (However, in a separate section of the app, they can view a variety of responses to their own posts.)

Additionally, the Threads app will allow users to search and find fediverse profiles, such as those of Flipboard users, WordPress writers who have enabled fediverse sharing, Mastodon users, and others.

The purpose of the features is to give Threads the feel of a federated application, which is one that is linked to the larger network of interconnected social media servers that comprise the open social web, which is decentralized.

With more than 350 million monthly active users, Threads is the largest app using the ActivityPub protocol, which powers other federated apps like the X competitor Mastodon, even though it hasn’t finished this integration.

Since its July 2023 launch, Threads has drawn inspiration from both open source protocols like Mastodon and Bluesky and more conventional social networks like X. Similar to Bluesky, Threads made it easier for users to find individuals to follow by introducing the idea of bespoke feeds and its own version of Starter Packs. Additionally, Threads is more closely linked to the fediverse than Mastodon, which enables users to interact with people who are not on Threads.

Since its launch, Threads has added capabilities that let users follow users on other fediverse servers, see who follows them back, and choose whether to distribute their postings on the fediverse and receive answers from Mastodon users.

Following initial debuts in the U.S., Canada, and Japan, Threads extended its fediverse sharing functionality to the European Union in June. Since introducing the fediverse sharing capability a year ago, Threads has communicated with more than 75% of all fediverse servers, according to Meta.

However, the business has not yet disclosed when account portability would be implemented or when it will be fully linked with the Fediverse. If Threads users ever felt that Meta’s policies weren’t to their satisfaction, they could utilize it to transfer their account to another location. Because it gives people, not systems, power, it’s a crucial component of open, decentralized apps.

Cottle thinks Meta might change up the postings more in the future, but he’s not sure if that’s a good idea. According to him, “there’s actually kind of a different use case for fediverse consumption,” which is more similar to traditional RSS readers. “I have a special location to catch up on my content from across the web, apart from a Following feed or a For You feed, since I might want to subscribe to Ghost publications or different authors.” He claims that there is some internal discussion at Meta over whether Threads should serve as a storehouse for all of that external information or if it should become a completely open social network.

In addition to automatically connecting to the accounts you’ve followed when you set up fediverse sharing, the Threads search box also allows you to look for individuals on Mastodon and other platforms. You will also begin to see their postings in Threads if you follow them. Because people are spread over so many different servers, this type of simple finding has long been one of Mastodon’s main issues. However, according to Cottle, Threads can perform something akin to universal fediverse search.

The realm of ActivityPub is still not treated like a first-class citizen within Threads, despite the fact that this is undoubtedly the most visible fediverse content to have ever existed there. You still need to have a different account to connect to, you still need to choose to share your articles, and you still need to visit the dedicated feed to see what’s new. (If you post something and receive a variety of responses, those are also distinct.)

According to Cottle, this division helps us comprehend various viewpoints. However, it appears that much more effort has to be done to get material into the platform and present it to users in a comprehensible manner.

In general, Cottle asserts that much more has to be done to inform individuals about the fediverse’s functions and even its definition. This explains why, despite the Threads team’s more aggressive shipping of things like DMs, spoiler alerts, and links in bios, Meta has been a little slower to roll out fediverse features. Regardless of how that turns out, Cottle says the team is dedicated to bringing Threads and the fediverse together.