Although Threads can be used as a standalone social network, it actually aims for more. The platform, called “Instagram Twitter”, is designed to be part of the federal universe, that is, to communicate and understand each other with decentralized platforms such as Mastodon, Peepeth or Pixelfed. It took a while, but eventually the new Meta social network added this compatibility. It may sound complicated, but let’s go through it.

Fedevren? This word expresses the philosophy of a decentralized social network. On X, Instagram or Facebook, all users’ data is hosted on a system of central servers, so it is the parent company that manages and owns all the data. Social networks are decentralized on Fediverso. Instead of a single site, data is spread across different instances, also called servers or federations, that communicate with each other.

We can enable or disable the integration with Fediverso at any time | Image: Meta

Example. The easiest way to see this is with Mastodon. We can register to Mastodon via the official server mastodon.social; but we can also do this on mstdn.social, mas.to or tkz.one. This will give us a user (jose@mastodon.social, jose@mas.to…). But it doesn’t matter which server we host it on, because anyone who knows our username can find us, interact with our posts, etc. You can follow me on Mas.to at mastodon.social. El Fediverso is a city, Mastodon is a neighborhood, and each is an apartment block.

Topics coming to Fediverse. What does this mean? Threads will now be able to communicate with servers that use the ActivityPub protocol, including Mastodon and Pixelfed. Servers that Meta wants to make clear that they neither own nor control. In this way, our Threads profile can be followed by people on other Fediverso servers and we will be able to do the same very soon. Currently this integration is in beta phase.

To distinguish users from other servers within Threads, they will appear like this: user@servidorfediverso.com. These users will be able to search for us, follow us, find us, reshare our posts with users of their servers, and interact with our posts through comments and ‘likes’.

Matters to consider. We can activate or deactivate our presence on Fediverso if we wish. When we activate it, an icon will appear while writing a message indicating that the post will be shared on Threads and other servers. When attempting to modify (e.g. delete) a post published on Fediverso, Threads will delete it from Threads and ask the federated servers to do so as well, but since Meta does not control these servers, it is possible for posts to remain visible.

Pictures | Xataka, Meta

in Xataka | Fediverso is the boost many social networks need to reinvent themselves