Metas Threads App Expands Fediverse Support: A Step Towards Decentralized Social Media

Meta's Threads app has recently received a couple of new features that expand its support for the fediverse, a network of independent servers that facilitate decentralized social media. The platform is committed to ensuring that Threads will be interoperable with fediverse servers, allowing users to follow and engage with users from other decentralized social apps like Mastodon within the app.

While Threads is not yet fully open to other platforms, users can share their updates to other fediverse servers and have people follow them from other platforms. Today, the app has expanded this functionality further, allowing fediverse-connected users to view posts from federated users within the app and search for fediverse-connected users via Threads.

However, it's important to note that not all federated servers will be available due to the need for them to use the same protocol as Threads. For example, while Mastodon is the largest of these platforms with around 1.4 million active users, it uses a different protocol than Threads and thus cannot communicate with it at this stage.

The real benefit of decentralized social platforms is that they provide more options and personal control over your in-app experience. As TechCrunch's Sara Perez noted in a recent article, if you don't like the tone of the topics trending on Bluesky, you can switch to other apps, change your default feeds, or even build your own social platform using the technology. This is a key advantage over traditional social media platforms that are controlled by a few large corporations.

However, the biggest challenge for fediverse adoption is that the vast majority of regular users just don't care. As seen in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2016, when Meta was being scrutinized over its handling of user data, there was a perceived backlash against Facebook, but Meta itself reported no meaningful decline in usage or an uptick in people updating their privacy settings. People don't like having to go into their settings and update their details, even when prompted.