Threads deepens its ties to the open social web, aka the ‘fediverse’ | TechCrunch

submitted by Fitik

techcrunch.com/2024/08/28/threads-deepens-its-t…

Meta announced that users on Threads will be able to see fediverse replies on other posts besides their own. In addition, posts that originated through the Threads API, like those created via third-party apps and scheduling services, will now be syndicated to the fediverse.

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56 Comments

Eggyhead

I don’t like this rebranding to “open social web” like it was made for them.

Randomgal

Something that is open and free was, by definition, made for everyone. Even the robber barons you hate.

Etterra

Boo. Go away Zuck and take your shitty vertical videos with you.

NostraDavid

We used to say that people who made vertical videos had Vertical Video Syndrome. It was a terrible time.

helenslunch

Currently, Threads users can like the replies from other servers, but they can’t yet reply to them, as the feature is still in beta and under development.

arudesalad , edited

It took around a year for a solo dev (and a couple contributors) to develop a fully federated platform. Why is it taking one of the largest companies on the planet this long to make such tiny changes that are useless anyway.

And why are they releasing it like this instead of releasing everything at once?

Stovetop

Because every step of the way, they need a flock of MBAs to figure out the answer to the question "How do we make money off of this?"

Ephera

I'm rather guessing the other way around. Because they can't directly extract money from this, they can't justify to their shareholders to sit down full-time devs. Instead, this is a project solely run by interns and student.

helenslunch

I'm guessing because they don't want it to.

Not_mikey

It is a different level of scale, mastodon has about 1 million users spread over a bunch of instances. Threads has over 200 million users on one instance. also due to the network nature of social media the amount of connections and messages sent through those connections can scale exponentially with the amount of users.

Max-P

Definitely can appreciate the carefulness here. Imagine they just open the floodgates and now some random Mastodon instance on a $5 VPS is getting hammered with millions of activities because they followed an account with millions of followers on Threads, and now it's federating millions of likes and thousands of posts.

Meta is trying to be a good fediverse participant here. They could just come in and crush the entire fediverse and be like "lol should have gotten beefier servers".

arudesalad

I'd hope it's carefulness but it doesn't seem like it. Facebook should want to destroy fediverse instances (from a business point of view), they are supposed to be a monopoly and the fediverse is their biggest competitor.

Max-P

Only time will tell. They've definitely done their own share of EEE like for a while you could use Facebook Messenger over XMPP then closed it down.

Jimbo

I am so glad my instance is defederated

pewgar_seemsimandroid

same

haui

Amen

Fitik [OP]

Note: You can't interact with Threads accounts from Lemmy, but you can interact with Threads accounts from MBin (and maybe PieFed), except if your instance is defederated from them obviously

There's POTUS account for example @potus@threads.net

some_guy

Why would I want to interact with people on threads? I’m here for the Lemmy community.

Lost_My_Mind

Why not Lemmy?

abff08f4813c

Lemmy doesn't implement Mastodon (which is the fediverse version of Twitter), only their own Lemmy one (Reddit clone). Kbin and Mbin implement both, as does pyfedi/piefed.

timestatic

What happened to Kbin btw? I used to be on there since the start but the page has been broken since a while for me

Zorque

It was run by one guy who had health issues. So it shut down. Mbin is the main fork now.

timestatic

Ah I see. Good thing someone continued it tho!

abff08f4813c , edited

The owner of kbin.social (and creator of kbin incidentally) has been MIA for a few months now, so it's presumed that it's over. I haven't heard of anything concrete regarding the fate of kbin.social or ernest though - unless someone has heard differently, it remains possible that ernest returns in a year or two and brings kbin.social back up.

Edit: I thought that https://kbin.earth/ still existed as an instance still running ernest's original flavour of kbin (as opposed to its sucessor mbin) but it turns out it has been moved to mbin as per the reply below.

With that, I'm not sure if anyone is still on the original kbin codebase at this point.

jwr1 , edited

This is not true, as of 4 months ago. kbin.earth is running Mbin now.

Lost_My_Mind

Why does Lemmy not interact with Mastodon if the other two can?

themadcodger

Design choice by the creators.

Lost_My_Mind

Am I the only one who thinks that's a bad choice? The whole point of the fediverse is that all the things are connected.

Fitik [OP]

Because right now the Threads federation is still pretty one sided, the Fediverse users can reply to the Threads posts, but the Threads users can't see the Fediverse posts, only replies

And with how Lemmy works, you can't reply to the microblogging accounts, you can't reply to Mastodon's posts neither, so you can't get your replies federated

unalivejoy

That doesn't seem right. I remember responding to a few mastodon threads from lemmy and I was able to see my reply on the other end.

originalucifer

lemmy devs just havent put in the effort, but its clear they are on that path.

abff08f4813c

Yep, pyfedi supports Mastodon integration just like mbin.

Rimu

Not quite as good as Mbin. For example you can't follow someone on mastodon from PieFed. They can follow you, though.

deegeese

Do regular Mastodon instances and clients play nicely with Threads?

I’ve been on Mastodon for a while and never seen a Threads user.

RandomStickman

On paper it should play well, it appeared as Mastodon would on my Mbin instance. A lot of Mastodon instances have preemptively defederated from Threads though, so you need to shop around.

JayTreeman

Or just don't federate with threads. Embrace, extend, extinguish is a thing

originalucifer

meta has not made using threads very easy for its users. only the technical or high visibility accounts seem to have cared to jump through the necessary hoops.

Fitik [OP]

Yea, they play fine, I use Misskey fork as my main instance, and it even supports quotes

Maybe your instance have defederated from them? Also the Fediverse sharing is opt-in in Threads, so like 95% or more Threads users haven't turned it on, cause they have no idea it exists

t�m

Which fork?

Fitik [OP]

Sharkey, but Threads quotes show up in basic Misskey as well

t�m

I tried regular misskey but I can't read Japanese

woelkchen

Do regular Mastodon instances and clients play nicely with Threads?

You can't connect to Threads using a Mastodon client but you can follow select Threads accounts from the Mastodon instance your client is connected to. Threads is still in what is basically a public beta. That's why there are currently no ads there either (but they were announced recently).

fadhl3y

I don't think i've ever seen a Threads message in any of my Lemmy / Mastodon feeds. Perhaps I'm not mixing in the right circles?

RVGamer06

Your instance likely defederated threads

Flax

Threads posts wouldn't really appear on lemmy unless they deliberately format the post to tag a community. And they wouldn't be able to see replies either.

Emmie , edited

Fediverse is not super far from original internet idea with the exception of convenient block feature. Let’s hope that’s enough to prevent the sequel.

Churbleyimyam

I don't want to see commercial content. I also don't want others to see it because it will pollute the culture of the Fediverse.

desktop_user

it will help it grow, maybe poisoning it in the process, but grow none the less.

Churbleyimyam

Pretty much like everything else corporations do then!