How Threads Will Integrate With the Fediverse ⇥ plasticbag.org

Tom Coates attended an event of some kind thrown by Meta in December in which the company laid out its fediverse plans for Threads:

Threads itself has only been around for a few months now and it still towers over the rest of the Mastodon community in terms of users. It’s based on the Instagram user base, and Instagram users can opt in to use Threads with a single tap. Because of that — as of a recent earnings report — Meta can currently claim around 160 million total users and about 100 million MAUs. So, again, Threads ‘integrating’ with the fediverse is maybe not the way to think about it, and Threads attempting to engage with it without entirely crushing it is closer to the mark.

Given that paragraph, you might be surprised by the overall optimistic tone of this piece. I found myself nodding along with Coates’ description of the challenges of trying to fit the Meta model into the fediverse, and vice versa. It is not impossible, it is going to require a lot of work, and it sounds like Meta wants to make a good faith effort. I do not much like Threads as an application, but I know many people are now active there and I would like to see their posts on my own terms.

Then again, I am reminded of the time Facebook launched a fakey email service which used email addresses for its own internal messaging capabilities. Fun fact — it was called “Project Titan”, which seems to be a name reserved for only the best projects.