Meta’s Threads Expands Fediverse Integration with New Features

The Threads team at Meta has spent the past year been working on supporting the broader fediverse and social web, and is launching its biggest integrations yet: a new dedicated feed for fediverse posts, and a way to search for fediverse users inside of Threads.

New Dedicated Feed for Fediverse Posts

Starting today, if you’ve turned on fediverse sharing in Threads, there will be a new section at the top of your Following feed that takes you to a list of posts from individuals you follow on Mastodon, Flipboard, or any other platforms you’ve connected your Threads account to. This feed is distinctly separate, which Meta software engineer Peter Cottle explains is intentional. “For everything from integrity to user impersonation, just for user understanding, it’s nice to have it as kind of a separate thing.” The fediverse feed is not algorithmically ranked, nor is it subject to any of Threads’ rules or moderation; it is simply a reverse-chronological feed of content you follow.

Understanding the Use Case for Fediverse Consumption

Over time, Cottle mentions that Meta could consider mixing the posts more, but he is uncertain if that would be beneficial. “There’s actually kind of a different use case for fediverse consumption,” he states, which resembles traditional RSS readers. “I might want to subscribe to Ghost publications or different authors, so I have this dedicated place to catch up on my across-the-web content, separately from a Following feed or a For You feed.” Internally at Meta, he notes, there is ongoing debate about whether Threads should function as a fully open social network or merely serve as a repository for external content.

Enhanced User Discovery Features

When you set up fediverse sharing, Threads automatically connects to any accounts you’ve followed. Additionally, you can now search for users on Mastodon and other platforms directly from the Threads search bar. If you follow these users, their posts will also appear in Threads. This streamlined discovery process has historically been one of the most significant challenges for Mastodon, given the distribution of users across numerous separate servers. However, Cottle asserts that Threads can facilitate a universal fediverse search.

Current Limitations of Fediverse Integration

While this is the most visible fediverse content has ever been within Threads, the world of ActivityPub is still not fully integrated into the platform. Users must opt-in to share their posts, maintain a separate account to connect to, and visit the dedicated feed to see new content. Furthermore, if a user posts something and receives fediverse replies, those interactions remain separate.

Future Directions and User Education

Cottle argues that this separation is a useful method for understanding different perspectives. However, it is evident that considerable work remains to be done in both integrating content into the platform and presenting it to users in a coherent manner.

In general, Cottle emphasizes that there is still much to be done in educating users about how the fediverse operates and what it entails. This is one reason why Meta has been somewhat slow in rolling out fediverse features, even as the Threads team has more aggressively introduced functionalities like DMs,, spoiler alerts, and links in bio. Nevertheless, Cottle assures that the team is committed to bridging Threads and the fediverse, regardless of how that may evolve.