by Dan Moren
A simple explainer on Threads and federation
Matt Birchler’s got an excellent and quick primer on what it means to turn on federation on your Threads profile:
I know I’m drilling this in a lot, but you literally do not need to have a Mastodon account. By not turning on federation from Threads, all you’re doing is making it so people who did figure out how to sign up for Mastodon and like it to not be able to follow you. You can choose to do that, but you never have to touch Mastodon if you don’t want to.
I’ve been using both Mastodon and Threads (and BlueSky) for a while now. Mastodon continues to my biggest platform in large part because a lot of the tech crowd has moved there, but I’ve seen upticks on Threads (for the general public) and BlueSky (a lot of writers and creative folks). While I miss the simplicity of the one-stop shop that was Twitter, I’m glad to see so many options thriving. But federation remains my big hope for how we might see cohesion in the next decade.
While Threads’s federation integration is still kind of bare bones, it does at least prove that Meta’s actually attempting to deliver on that promise. The biggest outstanding question for me is how ActivityPub and BlueSky’s AT protocol, which is also a form of federation, might end up interoperating.