When Meta announced Threads, their new Twitter competitor, they claimed in the very first paragraph that it would interoperate with Mastodon and other social networks based on the open-source ActivityPub protocol:
The official Mastodon site responded with their own blog post to address frequently asked questions based on what they had been told at the time:
But companies make big launch promises all the time that don’t ever pan out (just look at nearly every innovative feature that Google’s now-shuttered Stadia service promised).
With even the smallest bit critical thinking, I think that we can be pretty sure that Threads/Mastodon integration is never going to happen. So unless/until Meta actually launches it, let’s ignore it. Here’s why:
Elon Musk’s erratic management has many Twitter users looking for an alternative. The two competing social networks with the most traction before Threads were Mastodon and Bluesky, which spun out of Twitter in 2021. But while both social networks are active, neither of them have yet broken through to the mainstream. Mastodon is complex and is tailored to smaller communities who don’t want algorithmic ranking while Bluesky is still an invite-only network filled with largely with tech scene insiders.
Meta saw an opportunity to pounce on Twitter’s weakness and the so-far lack of a serious Twitter competitor. But Meta (neé Facebook) doesn’t exactly have a strong reputation with Twitter users. If you had asked nearly anyone two years ago if Facebook could have launched a viable Twitter competitor, they would have laughed at you. Why would anyone want to move to a Facebook product? After all, Facebook’s reputation was so bad that they renamed the company.
It was this from position of weakness that Meta announced plans for Threads to interoperate with Mastodon and the wider Fediverse. It was a calculated gamble. By supporting open protocols, Meta hoped to look like the sane and friendly alternative to Elon Musk’s increasingly insular social network. After all, would you trust Twitter who is cutting off API access to your favorite app or would you trust the company supporting open standards?
This is not to say that Meta was lying about their intentions to work with Mastodon. Large corporations are made up of lots of different people with different opinions. Surely some of the people at Meta believe in the Fediverse and some don’t. Launching social networks is incredibly difficult and risky and in balance it probably seemed prudent to leverage any advantage available.
But with the Thread’s launch, everything lined up perfectly for Meta. The combination of Twitter’s unpopularity and the widespread celebrity interest in being first to “the next Instagram” worked together perfectly. Threads’ launch wildly exceed even Meta’s best case hopes. Threads offers what Mastodon didn’t provide — an exact clone of Twitter packed with celebrities and without Elon Musk’s drama. Within days, Threads gained over 100 million users in 5 days, making it possibly the fastest growing app ever.
By comparison, Twitter has somewhere around 200-400 million active users. Mastodon has something like 1 million (pessimistic) to 13 million (ludicrously optimistic) active users.
So days after launch, Threads’ user base is within the same realm as as Twitter. Meanwhile, Cloudflare’s CEO claims that Twitter traffic is “tanking”.
Of course, a good launch doesn’t mean that Threads will “kill Twitter.” Social networks are fickle and time will tell. Just ask any former Google+ user. Google+ had half a billion users and still eventually failed.
But Threads’ best-cause launch does ensure one thing—Meta has no incentive to add Mastodon/ActivityPub integration now.
Of all the things that Meta could spend effort on now, adding integration with a free-wheeling wild west social network with maybe a few million users seems pretty far down the list. Threads is already many times larger than Mastodon. They’ve already won. They don’t need to play at being the good guy who supports open standards anymore. There’s no angle in it for them but there’s all sorts of downsides.
After all, many extremist groups use Mastodon derivatives to run their social networks. Does Meta really want to deal with the PR of deciding which Mastodon servers are allowed to talk to Threads users and which are not? And all that headache in the hopes of increasing the size of the Threads social network by 1%?
So here’s my argument: Ignore what Meta said about Threads connecting to Mastodon. It’s not going to happen.
What say ye now? https://www.threads.net/@zuck/post/C0zXcQmxO77/?igshid=MGQ5NDJhODMwMQ==
I love Meta because I really enjoy spending time on Facebook and Instagram and I hope Threads will be the next Twitter because I can't stand Elon Muskrat and I deleted Twitter the moment he bought it.