Some of the walls around Meta’s Threads app are coming down

The new kid on the block of social media, Meta’s Threads, hit 200 million active users in August. When it launched in the summer of 2023 as a rival to the platform formerly known as Twitter, Meta said the app would eventually be integrated into the so-called fediverse. This “federated universe” is the most prominent example of a decentralized social network in which users can join any affiliated platform and interact with content from the others.

Recently, Meta took steps to integrate Threads into that ecosystem, and Will Oremus, tech news analysis writer for The Washington Post, has been tracking the developments. The following is an edited transcript of his conversation with Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino.

Will Oremus: After Elon Musk bought Twitter in late 2022, some people immediately went looking for any kind of alternative that was not owned by Elon Musk. So people went to Mastodon first, which is the best-known app on the fediverse that exists today. Then came Bluesky, and then came Threads. This was in July 2023 that Threads finally launched. And so it was the newcomer here. And so when it launched, one of their ideas was, hey, what if we actually could allow our users to interact with folks who are on Mastodon and other fediverse apps? Maybe that would be another incentive for them to come. Maybe we could, sort of, you know, in a way, join forces with those other apps.

Meghan McCarty Carino: So Meta has taken these baby steps into the fediverse. What have they done?

Oremus: The first step that Threads took was to allow people on Mastodon to follow people who are on Threads and see their Threads posts within Mastodon. Over the months, Meta has added more integrations bit by bit. So today, if you’re on Mastodon, you can not only follow someone’s Threads post, but you can hit like on them, you can reply to them. And people on Threads can now see who on Mastodon or other fediverse apps is following them. They can see who liked their post, they can see those replies. What they still can’t do is interact in any meaningful way with the folks who are following them from Mastodon. So the Threads user can’t then go ahead and reply back without leaving the Threads app.

McCarty Carino: So do you have a sense of whether Threads users are actually, you know, kind of attracted to this decentralized model? Does the average user even know what it means for, you know, their data to be interoperable in this way?

Oremus: I would guess that the average Threads user has no idea what the fediverse is. If they’ve seen that setting that says, “Turn on fediverse sharing” in the Threads app, they’re probably like, what the heck is that? Mastodon has about 10 million active users, Threads has over 200 million, so Threads now dwarfs Mastodon. And I think for most people, it doesn’t feel necessary. You’re not significantly broadening your audience by broadcasting to the fediverse. It’s really the power users, you know, the techies, the people who are really into social media and also the developers who are interested in this, the people who are thinking about developing social apps. For them, it’s significant to know that Meta is working on supporting the fediverse because it means that down the road, there’s potentially a much more mainstream addressable audience in the fediverse, especially if Meta eventually allows people in Threads to see content from Mastodon and other fediverse apps.

McCarty Carino: Meta is, you know, with Instagram, with Facebook, they are the closed social media network model. They have been the biggest and most successful centralized social media company. So why do you think the company is actually making these moves to kind of move to a more open model?

Oremus: Yeah. Historically, Meta has had the highest walls of all the walled gardens in social media. I remember five or eight years ago, when you used to be able to post on Instagram and have it show up on Twitter, and they turned that off because they considered Twitter a rival. They’ve historically just shut down any kind of interoperability between apps. So it is really interesting and a bit surprising to see them embrace the fediverse. It’s notable, though, that they’re doing it so far only with Threads. Threads is not a moneymaker for Meta at all. I don’t think it makes any money at this point. It has 200 million users, which is a lot compared to Mastodon, but a drop in the bucket compared to Instagram or Facebook or WhatsApp. So it’s really a place where they can feel a little more free to experiment. It’s also, again, a place where they were not the incumbent. This realm of sort of real-time, text-based social media is still dominated by X, formerly Twitter, and so they’re the upstart here, and that may help to explain why they’re experimenting with a different approach.

And interestingly, we’ve also seen that in Meta’s approach to [artificial intelligence]. ChatGPT was the first to pioneer these consumer-grade chatbots. They were many people’s first experience with large language models. You had image apps like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion that came along. Then Google and Microsoft were right on their heels. Meta has been behind on that, and Meta notably took an approach where they built their large language models in a more open-source way so that people can build on them, people can develop their own versions of Meta’s models. They’ve been the champion among the big players of open-source technology and AI, and so it’s not just in the social media realm. It seems to be part of their playbook now that if they’re behind and they’re trying to catch up, they’ll take this more open model. If you want a historic analogy in the internet world, it’s also what Google did with Android. The iPhone came first, unless we count the BlackBerry, and Google was playing catch-up when it wanted to build its own phone operating system. So Google built Android in a more open way so that other companies could develop and build around it. And that proved a successful way for Google to catch up in mobile operating systems.

McCarty Carino: Given that dynamic, do you have any expectation that other social media giants, I guess including Facebook and Instagram, would ever follow suit and move to the fediverse?

Oremus: You know, it’s hard to see it at this moment. They just don’t have a lot of incentive to do that. But the fact that Threads is experimenting with it, I mean, if it goes well for Threads and Meta, especially I think if Meta finds itself in a better position with regulators or if Europe were to pass laws requiring more openness, the fact that Meta has been experimenting with this on Threads is going to position them better to respond with Instagram, with Facebook, if they’re forced to. I don’t necessarily see them doing it voluntarily, but I guess you never know.

More on this

Last year, when Meta first teased the idea it would be integrating Threads into the fediverse, we talked to Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan about what the fediverse is and what it would mean for a social media giant like Meta to join it. He said a good way to think about decentralized social media is to compare it to email. You might have a Gmail address, but you can still message with people on Microsoft or AOL.

This ethos of decentralization and interoperability has been central to the internet since the beginning, he pointed out. But he said there are disadvantages when it comes to privacy and content moderation. In a decentralized model, it’s much harder to control where your content ends up. Once you post something, it’s almost impossible to delete it because it may have traveled to any number of different servers. And without a centralized entity in charge of the network, it’s pretty hard to enforce any rules.