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 Threads doing this? How is the team working with the community? How are they thinking about moderation, monetization and privacy in these early days and going forward?

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:

• Meta’s motivations
• How foundational is the fediverse for Threads (vs. it being a “feature”)
• Deciding to use ActivityPub instead of another protocol
• Threads’ roadmap and next step
• Addressing community concerns around seriousness of investment, moderation, monetization and more
• Future of interoperability within Meta

We drop episodes first on Flipboard’s PeerTube instance at flipboard.video. 

Please follow us on PeerTube if you aren’t already. When you do, the videos become available via any other platform connected by ActivityPub. (It’s basically like having your YouTube, X and Instagram feeds and comments in one central, interoperable home feed. This is the beauty and the power of decentralized social media!)

You can find Dot Social on Flipboard, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, YouTube, anywhere else you might listen to podcasts.

We’ll continue to bring you new episodes with fascinating Fediverse leaders as we record them. The best way to never miss an episode is to subscribe to the show. Please also rate, review, comment and share, especially if you like what you hear. 

See you in the Fediverse!

— Mia Quagliarello, head of creator community, is curating Fedi Curious?