A new update to Meta Platforms Inc.’s social media platform Threads will allow users to connect their social media profiles to the fediverse, which will allow them to be visible on other platforms such as Mastodon.

The capability, announced by Meta’s engineering team on Thursday, allows users in the United States, Canada and Japan to “federate” their user profiles to ActivityPub-compliant servers. This will also allow other users on those servers to like, reply to and repost their posts.

The fediverse is a larger decentralized network of social media servers linked by the open protocol ActivityPub, widely popularized by the decentralized social network Mastodon. The word, combining “federation” and “universe,” represents the ability for anyone to run their own independent server and connect to the broader social network, which runs as a decentralized network with no central authority.

Each server in the fediverse can set its own community standards and moderation guidelines for what posts pass through its boundaries. This means that the people involved in those spaces align with its specific values even as it connects with the broader decentralized social network.

“When we set out to build Threads our goal was always to build a decentralized social networking app within the fediverse,” Meta said in its announcement. “Federated networking gives people greater control over their online identity and the content they see, regardless of their chosen platform.”

Meta previously revealed that it intended to connect Threads to the fediverse beginning in July 2023. Reports go even further back that Meta was reportedly exploring building its own decentralized network that would use ActivityPub as early as March of last year. By December, Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg made a post on Threads announcing the test of a fediverse-enabled message.

“Starting a test where posts from Threads accounts will be available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol,” Zuckerberg said at the time. “Making Threads interoperable will give people more choice over how they interact and it will help content reach more people. I’m pretty optimistic about this.”

Fediverse capabilities are currently opt-in for users and will federate user profiles, allowing people on other servers to follow federated Threads profiles to see, reply to and repost Threads posts, if the server permits it. However, since the rollout is still in beta mode, the initial phase does not allow Threads users to see who liked their posts or any replies from people outside of Threads in the fediverse. Currently, Threads users will have to visit fediverse servers directly to see those interactions.

Certain other types of posts and content are also not federated currently including posts with restricted replies, replies to non-federated posts, reposts of non-federated posts and posts with polls, until a later update.

The Threads team said a “phased approach” is being taken to see how content is flowing through the platform for federated content so the team can “build responsibly” and address feedback as new features are added. That will allow the team to understand safety concerns and provide users with the necessary time to acclimate to the new interface.

“More federated features for Threads will come once we have addressed other technical hurdles in a way that we feel is safest and offers the best possible user experience,” the Meta Threads team said. “Within all of this, it’s also important to us that, as we build these solutions, we do so alongside the open and decentralized fediverse developer community.”

Image: Freepik