Threads Begins Testing Federation
It's finally happening!
Well, it finally happened. Meta’s fledgling microblogging platform, Threads, has begun testing their support of the ActivityPub protocol. Here’s a quote from Mark Zuckerberg himself:
Post by @zuckView on Threads
The fact that Facebook’s CEO and founder is publicly endorsing federation is nothing short of mind-blowing. Not everybody is happy about it, of course, but this could kick off a massive amount of momentum in other online platforms also supporting ActivityPub, which could be a significant driver for protocol adoption.
What lies ahead
There are still a lot of open questions about this situation, including when a full rollout might be happening, what kind of Trust & Safety steps the Threads team is looking at, and how a large corporate node will interact with the rest of the network.
Post by @mosseriView on Threads
A few days ago, Meta held a meeting with various members of the Threads team and some key people that understand the Fediverse. From this dialogue, we can determine that the Threads team is trying to handle a thoughtful, gradual rollout for federation that aligns with the EU regulations placed on Meta.
Update: Ben Savage from Meta wrote in to the public-swicg W3C mailing list about the matter, and further clarified the current situation:
Ben Savage here from Meta. Just a few quick points:
- This test is not yet started (debugging some last technical issues together with Mastodon engineers)
- Only a few accounts will be a part of this initial test. My Threads account (https://www.threads.net/@btsavage) will be one of those and I’m happy to make test posts to help people who want to work on Threads integration.
- We will share details about how to test soon, once we iron these issues out.
