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Meta continues its slow march towards federation compliance. The company has been experimenting with creating posts from a few available accounts since the end of last year. Now, we’re given a brief preview of how the integration will work and what it might look like when other people have the ability to contribute from threads directly to the federation.
Instagram engineer Peter Cottle gave a short presentation about “Threads in the Fediverse” on the watch , a virtual event for fans of decentralized social media. In the demo, Cottle explains how Threads users will be able to sign up for federated sharing and provides some insight into how Meta should think about its role in federated sharing.
In a short video presentation, first by the edge, Cottle introduces a new account setting called “Federal Sharing.” As the name suggests, the menu will enable users to make their posts viewable from Mastodon and other platforms that use ActivityPub. It’s worth noting that it also appears to come with a lengthy disclaimer explaining exactly what this will mean for its content.
“I think it’s actually tough for Threads because we have something like 130 million people using it every month, but a lot of people haven’t heard of federation,” Cottle said. “But we want to give them the ability to get into that kind of experience. So we have to explain the union and explain all the disclaimers and then make sure they feel good about the outcome.”
Visually, the Federation will be represented on Threads by an icon that somewhat resembles a planet (the icon was previously used In the code in the application). Cottle explained that users who have enabled federated sharing will have the icon viewable on their profiles and that they will see an indication in the app author if the post will be visible in federated. Cottle also confirmed that only public accounts will have the ability to share with everyone. He also noted that users will have a 5-minute window before posts go live in order to make any changes or edits as Threads cannot guarantee that a deleted Threads post will also be deleted from the federation.
The demo comes as Meta begins adding a few additional accounts to its diverse sharing experience. For now, Mastodon users can follow the Instagram boss and a handful of other Threads users, but the company has not provided an update on when the functionality will be more widely available. Cottle’s demo also didn’t touch on how sharing from Mastoodn and other services that support ActivityPub to Threads would work. (Currently, if a Mastodon user replies to a thread post, the reply is On Mastodon, not on threads.)
But Cottle’s demo is another sign that the Meta is gaining growing momentum for itself seriously. “I know there’s a lot of skepticism about threads entering the Federation universe, and that’s completely understandable,” Cottle said. “But I want to put forward that I think everyone on the team has really good intentions. We really want to be a really good member of the community and give people the ability to experience what federal diversity and the power of protocol are.”
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