Linked List: December 14, 2023

Thursday, 14 December 2023

Threads Has Begun Federating Via ActivityPub 

Adam Mosseri, on Threads, with the other big news of the day:

Second, threads posted by me and a few members of the Threads team will be available on other fediverse platforms like Mastodon starting this week. This test is a small but meaningful step towards making Threads interoperable with other apps using ActivityPub — we’re committed to doing this so that people can find community and engage with the content most relevant to them, no matter what app they use.

And behold, you can now follow @[email protected] from any Mastodon instance whose administrators haven’t chosen to preemptively block Threads. When Threads launched this summer, with the stated intention of federating via ActivityPub, there were a lot of naysayers who thought it would never happen. But here we are.

Johannes Ernst, on his blog:

I participated in a meeting titled “Meta’s Threads Interoperating in the Fediverse Data Dialogue” at Meta in San Francisco yesterday. It brought together a good number of Meta/Threads people (across engineering, product, policy), some Fediverse entrepreneurs like myself, some people who have been involved in ActivityPub standardization, a good number of industry observers / commentators, at least one journalist, and people from independent organizations whose objective is to improve the state of the net. Altogether about 30 people.

It was conducted under the Chatham House rule, so I am only posting my impressions, and I don’t identify people and what specific people said. [...]

I came away convinced that the team working on Threads indeed genuinely wants to make federation happen, and have it happen in a “good” way. I did not get any sense whatsoever that any of the people I interacted were executing any secret agenda, whether embrace-and-extend, favoring Threads in some fashion or anything like that. (Of course, that is a limited data point, but I thought I’d convey it anyway.)

Yours truly, back in June (before Threads even launched): “Not That Kind of ‘Open’”.

Threads Launches in the E.U., Where, Apparently, Many People Live 

Jon Porter, The Verge:

Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads, is now available in the European Union, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced. “Today we’re opening Threads to more countries in Europe,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Threads. The launch follows the service’s debut in the US and over 100 other countries across the world, including the UK, in July 2023. But until now, Threads hasn’t been available to the 448 million people living in the EU, and the company has even blocked EU-based users from accessing the service via VPN.

To coincide with today’s launch, Meta is giving users in the region the ability to browse Threads without needing a profile. Actually posting or interacting with content will still require an Instagram account, however.

Threads has continued to thrive, grow, and improve, and that should accelerate significantly now that EU citizens can join. There’s a persistent but false narrative that Threads is struggling, which just isn’t true. E.g. from The Guardian today:

Threads launched in July 2023 and quickly amassed more than 100 million users in its first week. The platform has since seen a large drop off in active users, but Zuckerberg in earnings calls has remained steadfast that the platform would eventually reach its goal of 1 billion users.

Like I wrote back in July: “Nobody Uses Threads Anymore, It’s Too Crowded”. While Twitter/X seemingly still has more daily active users, Threads has consistently ranked way way ahead of X in the rankings on both the App Store and Play Store. Those app store rankings don’t measure usage, but they do reflect momentum — Threads is gaining it, and Twitter/X is losing it. And that’s before Threads was available in the EU.

Apple Now Sells the AirPods Pro USB-C Case by Itself 

Chris Welch, writing at The Verge:

Apple has begun selling the USB-C charging case for its second-generation AirPods Pro as a standalone purchase. But it doesn’t come cheap. The MagSafe-compatible case, available immediately, is priced at $99.

Glad they’re offering the standalone case, but alas, it seems like you can’t get it engraved like you can when you buy a whole set of AirPods.