We spoke with a product manager at Meta to learn how the company plans to bring interoperability to Threads in the coming months. It faces both technical and cultural challenges.

Meta is treading carefully, doing a phased implementation while continuing conversations with Fediverse leaders. This will give the company more time to iron out some of the integration kinks. “Do we adapt the protocol to be able to support this?” Lambert asks. “Or do we try to do some kind of interesting, unique implementation?” For example, Threads supports audio posts, a feature not currently supported within ActivityPub, so Meta is experimenting with “federating” a text transcription of the original post instead of the audio version.

It was never a good idea federating with Threads

  • @[email protected]English
    6•11 months ago

    Another big, lingering question is why Meta wants to do this in the first place. Lambert says Meta wants to give users more control over their posts and followers, with easier avenues to engage across platforms.

    So will they be implementing a method to export this data in ways that could be imported to other platforms? Otherwise I don’t see where federation fits in here all that much.

    Extending reach isn’t really the same as control imo.