Meta’s short-form microblogging darling, Threads, has moved ever closer towards becoming fully integrated with the rest of the Fediverse. Over the course of 2024, the platform has slowly adopted a handful of Fediverse integration features, ranging from federated profiles to receiving likes and replies on the wider network.

A Beginner’s Guide to the Fediverse, for Threads Users (Updated July 3rd, 2024)

Are you a Threads user who just started hearing about the Fediverse? Don’t worry! We’re here to answer your burning questions, while keeping it simple!

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“Starting today, you can follow people from other fediverse servers who have interacted with federated users or posts on Threads,” writes Instagram Head Adam Mosseri. Mark Zuckerberg even chimed in, stating “[The] next step towards making Threads fully interoperable in the Fediverse: now you’ll be able to follow people from other Fediverse servers who liked, followed, or replied to federated profiles on Threads.”

Naturally, we had to test this out for ourselves.

Finding a Fediverse Profile

For the time being, the new feature is intended for seeing the profiles of any Fediverse user that’s already interacted with your federated profile in some way, shape, or form. However, Threads offers a special link that can be used to look up specific profiles, provided the following:

1. You have Fediverse Sharing set to On in your Threads Account.
2. That person isn’t blocking you.
3. That person or their server admin isn’t blocking Threads.net.

As long as you know a person’s Fediverse handle (@user@server.tld), you can plug it into this URL pattern: https://www.threads.net/fediverse_profile/@user@server.tld

Current Limitations

While this new feature is a major milestone for both Threads and the Fediverse, there’s still a number of things that don’t work.

• Accounts from the wider network don’t yet show up on the timeline or in search.
• You won’t be able to see posts from before that account federated with Threads.
• It’s not currently possible to boost Fediverse posts to regular Threads yet.
• Replies made on Threads don’t yet federate back to the original post author.

Future Possibilities?

One other interesting note comes from a comment on Bridgy Fed’s issue tracker by Peter Cottle, one of Meta’s ActivityPub developers.

From the Threads side, we are in a federate by default (blocklist mode). The bridge is just any other instance, and I think our users would be super excited to be able to converse with (and see content from) Bluesky.

Obviously, this is simply conjecture from Meta’s developer, but the thought is intriguing…what if Bluesky and Threads users could easily talk to and follow each other? It’s already possible to follow Bridgy Fed from Threads, which federates posts to Bluesky. In the linked Threads post, Peter already noted a protocol bug, and the team deployed a fix to make mirroring possible.

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