On the threads was revealed the roadmap for Mastodon and other decentralized applications, including the Twitter/X competitor. A really interesting new blog post by Tom Coates, a co-founder of an older decentralized app called Planetary, details events from a December meeting at Meta's offices about how the Threads team reached out to members of the fediverse community to get feedback about the Instagram-led project to take on X with a decentralized app that will eventually interoperate with others in the fediverse by way of the ActivityPub protocol.

This meeting Coates called a "good faith" effort by the Instagram team; at it, the plan for how Threads would enter the fediverse was sketched out: first, in December, there would be a feature within the Threads app that made their posts visible to Mastodon clients. By December, Meta began testing ActivityPub integration, and by the same month, Threads posts began appearing on Mastodon. But it only did that with a select few among the Instagram team, head Adam Mosseri has become the second-most followed account on Mastodon now, behind Mastodon's official account, with followers at 675,606.

In the meeting, the Threads team also shared the steps ahead for its app moving into the fediverse; in early 2024, replies posted on Mastodon servers would become visible in the Threads application and, later in the year, users would be able to follow Mastodon accounts within Threads, reply to them and like their posts. The full interoperability between the two platforms, however, was still to be determined, Coates said.

They also said that the team discussed how they will approach content moderation as they move forward with fediverse integration, adding that if any content from a wider fediverse is found to break their rules, they would exclude it from being visible in the Threads app. In addition, this rule probably applies when a user banned from Meta's platform moves the content to another Mastodon server.

Other questions remained unanswered at that point — such as if Threads would surface third-party Mastodon content in its algorithmic feed, if it would ultimately allow for algorithmic choice, if Mastodon content would be made visually differentiated from Threads' in some way, and a few others. The takeaway is that the move of Threads into the fediverse is quite still a work in progress, and the team's actively trying to determine the best path.

One interesting tidbit of the post was Coates mentioning how he had received from other sources that Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg believed that Threads should be "totally open" – effectively that openness is the future of social networking. Coates suggests several reasons why Meta might be doing this-to stop the impending regulation or to fill Twitter/X's place in zeitgeist now that Elon Musk is buying it and making it a daily app, which might water down the value as a fast-breaking news network and home of conversations. Or maybe it is simply that Zuckerberg is predicting the future of where the web is headed.

He is, of course, not alone in a bid to place a bet on a decentralized future. Flipboard recently became a federated app and started supporting ActivityPub. Automattic similarly facilitated making all WordPress.org blogs as well as those of WordPress.com federated. And announced it will similarly make Tumblr federated early next year. Plus both Medium and Mozilla set up their own servers and, for instance, Mozilla is backing Mastodon client Mammoth, among others.

What was exciting about Mastodon and ActivityPub was that it wasn't just where social media was going, but where the web itself was going," said Flipboard CEO Mike McCue in a conversation with TechCrunch last month.

"I saw what was going on with ActivityPub, and it became very evident to me that this is just the future of the web, period," McCue said. He compared it with his early days at Netscape, convincing publishers to join the web by building a website. After some time, web pages linking to each other became what the web is today.

What we are discussing about with social web is people linking up to pages and people linking up to people, therefore it is a much intricate web. And so, it is the future of the web," he further added.