Threads to join 'fediverse' as Zuckerberg seeks to increase reach of struggling social media platform

On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that users of Threads will soon become "interoperable" via the "fediverse," giving users the ability to share posts to other social media platforms such as Mastodon.

The Meta CEO explained that the move would allow content on Threads, which expanded into more countries in Europe on Thursday, to reach a larger audience, and improve communication between networks.


 

"Starting a test where posts from Threads accounts will be available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol," Zuckerberg wrote. "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."

ActivityPub is a "decentralized social networking protocol" that powers the fediverse, which describes itself as a "diverse community of interconnected social media platforms ... which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other."

The viability of the fediverse was questioned by one Threads user who suggested Meta would use it as a "one-way hose to broadcast what we do here elsewhere," which would be "good for Threads but not Mastodon."

"I can't post here from Mastodon," he added. "If someone replied to me there, I wouldn't see it here ... Porting from Twitter to Threads is as laborious as it would be from Threads to Mastodon."

Adam Mossei, the head of Instagram, replied by saying that the users concerns would be addressed in time.

"We're starting with the ability to follow Threads users from ActivityPub clients," he said, "but we will get to the ability to follow accounts from ActivityPub servers on Threads as well."

Timcast host Tim Pool said that "If Meta beats X to this it will actually disrupt X."

As NBC News reports, the fediverse currently has around 11 million users, about fourteen times less than Threads, whose numbers are expected to grow as it expands into more countries.

The social media platform gained popularity in the first few days after it launched in July, however, growth has slowed in the months since.