Last night Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, quitely announced the next step in the integration of Threads into the Fediverse. In addition to being able to follow Threads accounts from Fediverse/Mastodon accounts, we can now reply to and like Threads posts. Threads are taking a quiet, incremental approach to Federation, but seem genuinely commited.
From About Threads and the fediverse
If you turn on sharing to the fediverse, users on other servers can search for and follow your profile, view your posts, interact with your content, and share your content to anyone on or off their server. On Threads, you’ll be able to see the number of users on other servers who liked your post. You’ll also be able to see and like their replies to your post.
I wonder how Facebook is going to deal with the inherent privacy flaws of federated social networks. Nobody cares about things like the GDPR or the CCPA for medium social media servers like lemmy.world or Mastodon.social, but when it comes to giants like Facebook and Tumblr things may very well become problematic. No way Facebook is going to sign a data processing agreement with a couple of thousand Fediverse servers.
Pretty cool that the Fediverse is good enough for Facebook to continue investing into it. With Threads, WordPress, and Flipboard, we may very well see more companies cross-integrate through ActivityPub in the future. I don’t think Bluesky’s federation model will take off, despite it being a lot better on technical level for large services than ActivityPub is.