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’”.

★ Thursday, 14 December 2023