Meta has announced a new expansion of Threads, the “Twitter of Instagram”, in the so-called “fediverse”. From now on, users over 18 years old will be able to like and see the replies to their posts on the social network, which already appear on other platforms that use the ActivityPub protocol, such as Mastodon and Bluesky.
Access to the fediverse, which is in beta phase, was initially available to users in the United States, Canada, and Japan beginning in March, but now it’s been extended to more than 100 countries, according to Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
From now on, users accessing the Threads application will see a new tutorial that explains what the fediverse is. The tutorial describes it as a network of interconnected servers and provides information on how the exchange between federated platforms works, helping users to better understand this social network.
Meta indicates that users who choose to share their posts on the fediverse will see their Threads messages available in other applications that also use ActivityPub, such as Mastodon. Additionally, “Likes” and replies from other federated social networks will be available directly in Threads. However, in this beta phase, only top-level messages and their own replies will be federated, excluding other types of messages such as polls and those with reply controls.
To activate this feature, users must go to their Account Settings and select the option “Fediverse Sharing (Beta)”, where they will also find detailed instructions and a link to the Supplementary Privacy Policy of Threads.
With this integration, Threads has become the largest application in the fediverse, with over 150 million monthly active users in the month of April. Excluding Threads, the fediverse has over 11 million users total, and about 800,000 of these have come from Mastodon.
