On March 21, Meta’s Threads entered the fediverse. This means that people on other ActivityPub-powered platforms, like Mastodon, can follow federated Threads profiles and see, like, reply to, and repost posts from the fediverse. (Eventually, you’ll be able to follow other fediverse accounts from Threads, too.) It’s still early days, but Threads’ entry shows the ecosystem coming together at a larger scale, starting with the promise of interoperability.

Threads’ presence in the fediverse has been the elephant in the room since it was announced in July 2023. Now that it’s actually happening, there is as much skepticism as excitement. Why is Meta doing this? How are they working with the community to get it right? And what do they have to say about concerns about their involvement?

In this episode of Dot Social, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue talks to two key leaders tasked with building the Threads experience: Rachel Lambert, Director of Product Management, and Peter Cottle, Software Engineer. Both are long-time Meta employees with a genuine care for open-source software and communities, as well as trust and safety. In fact, Rachel launched the Oversight Board, which helps Meta be accountable for trust and safety decisions across its social apps.

Highlights of this conversation include:

1:21 Reasons why is Meta entering the fediverse with Threads
3:30 How foundational is the fediverse for Threads (vs being more like a feature)?
5:25 Were AT protocol or other protocols ever in consideration, or was ActivityPub always the protocol you knew you’d use?
6:35 Benefits of larger companies adopting new technologies
8:07 More choice and voting with your feet, plus product development upside
9:06 Reactions from users, creators, the fediverse
12:15 Who’s federated that they’re excited about
13:27 The next steps in Threads’ federation
15:55 Addressing concerns about Meta in the fediverse
19:45 Could the concept of federation apply to other areas of Meta?
20:34 Privacy settings: Threads veers public
21:09 Addressing concerns around moderation and inviting in toxicity
25:57 Empowering instance admins; leveraging Meta toolkit for moderation?
27:49 Moderation at the protocol level, refined tools, expectation setting
30:00 Concerns over surveillance economy emerging in the fediverse; concerns over privacy and data
33:24 Evangelizing federation: Patreon, paid access models for creators?
35:55 Spirit of collaboration and community-building

🔎 You can follow Rachel at @rklambo@threads.net and Peter at @pcottle@threads.net

✚ You can follow Mike on Mastodon at @mike@flipboard.social and @mike@flipboard.com, and on Threads at @mmccue@threads.net

💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the Fediverse, sign up here: http://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave