We knew Instagram was making Topics, but its arrival is pretty intense. If anyone could rival Twitter, it was Zuckerberg. It’s exactly what we expected: minimalist, simple and popular. But it also brings some surprises, like Threads will work with the fediverse. So with Mastodon.

Compatible with decentralized networks. While not a starter, Meta explains that Threads will be compatible with ActivityPub, the same open and decentralized protocol Mastodon uses and established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

This means Threads can work with Mastodon as well as Tumblr, Medium, Mozilla or WordPress platforms that plan to use this protocol.

As it can be read when signing up for topics: “soon you will be able to follow people and interact with them on other services of the fediverse like Mastodon”. Different apps and ways of working can only be accessed by a single company without the messages we write. It’s a radical change from what we’ve ever done on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

Is Zuckerberg embracing the open web? If there is one thing to be said about the creator of Facebook, it is that he has a good view of social networks. After the disaster with the Metaverse, Threads seems to be managing to point it where it needs to be.

It is noteworthy that Meta, a company traditionally characterized by being extremely closed in terms of the social networks ecosystem, has now decided to adopt the open web.

The company itself explains this in its Threads launch statement: “Our vision is to usher in a new era of diverse and interconnected networks where people using compatible apps can follow and engage with people even without a Threads account and vice versa.

Same messages, different rules. Thanks to the use of this protocol, it will be possible in the future to interact with Threads messages through other applications. The idea is that each sets its own rules in terms of algorithms, content moderation, and choosing which messages the user receives.

While a particular Mastodon server will give you more leeway when it comes to sending messages, in the future they may choose to remove messages that deviate from their established lines from their Threads.

“A great victory for the Mastodon cause.” This is how Eugen Rochko, CEO and founder of Mastodon, defined it. Threads using ActivityPub “not only validate the transition to decentralized social networks, but also offer a way for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. This puts pressure on these platforms to offer better and less unfair services.

In other words, it’s good news that Threads is betting on Mastodon. As it allows more people to get to know this system and consider trying servers beyond what Instagram offers.

The big difference: The issues are still a privacy drama. Just because they work with the same protocol doesn’t mean Mastodon’s privacy is the same as Threads. Nothing else.

If we look at Threads’ privacy statement, we see that the app is able to read and transmit sensitive personal information, from our sexual orientation to our political views, to third parties. Subjects can read data about our business, advertisements that interest us, and collect location-based information. In short, Threads interferes with privacy as much as Instagram.

Mastodon is ad-free (and also doesn’t show ads from Topics). The change is big for Mastodon, who argues that he does not share private data with anyone other than the server where the account is hosted. Even the images displayed are cached and reprocessed so that the original server of those images cannot read the IP or who accessed them.

This also applies to advertising. No one can add ads to your feed except the application or server we host. This will result in none of the ad messages from the Topics reaching your feed unless you are using the same Topics. Logically speaking, except that they are regular messages manually announced by the people you follow. But then you can say something to them or mute them, as we did with other messages.

It will be up to each Mastodon server to choose how it relates to topics. Mastodon and Threads are expected to become interoperable soon. This means that messages can be sent from one platform to another. Mastodon.Social is expected to be the first server to add Threads support.

How Mastodon merges with Threads will depend on each server. The server admin can choose not to display Topic posts because they don’t want to merge with the Instagram service. If that happens and we don’t like it, it’s as easy as switching to another server. If there is one thing with the ActivityPub protocol, it’s that the messages are common, but each house dictates its own rules. Fortunately, it’s as easy as a few clicks if we don’t like to go elsewhere.

Threads decided that fediverso would have another home. Another issue is how new its rules are compared to what we had before.

on Xataka | This client solves Mastodon’s big problem with Twitter: the interface