Threads is expanding its presence on Fediverse. Threads users 18 and older with public accounts will be able to join, share content and interact more widely on Fediverse, Meta said Tuesday, and the change will take place in more than 100 countries.
“Fediverse” is a collection of social media platforms that can communicate with each other. Meta announced on March 21 that Threads had joined the fediverse, with an initial beta version available to users in select countries. Now, with expanded access to Threads and its more than 130 million monthly active users, the service is introducing Fediverse to millions of people.
If you’re still confused, don’t worry. The way you use your Threads account will not change and Fediverse sharing is an optional feature. All of this means that you will have the opportunity to share your posts more widely, particularly with another popular platform on Fediverse: Mastodon. Here’s everything you need to know about Fediverse and how to change Threads settings to join.
What is Fediverso?
Fediverse is the term given to federated social networks: platforms that belong to a larger group or organization. Federated social media platforms are united under a set of open source decentralized platforms. ActivityPub protocols built by the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C.
These protocols are a set of rules that structure the way social media sites are built and designed behind the scenes. Social media apps that use these protocols can speak each other’s languages, making it easier to share content between them. Think about email: You can read an email sent from your friend’s Yahoo account even if they use Gmail, no problem. This is because email servers run on similar protocols, so they appear the same on all clients.
With Fediverse, ActivityPub protocols systematize social media posts so that posts from one social media platform can be remembered and shared on another. Currently, the largest Fediverse platforms are Mastodon, Threads and WordPress (via plugin). So you can directly share your Threads posts to any Mastodon server and other federated platforms, such as image-focused ones. PixelFed and video-focused PeerTube.
But there is one important thing to note about Fediverse: it is built around the ideas of being open source and decentralized. This is why Mastodon is usually talked about in the same breath as Fediverse: before Threads, Mastodon was the largest platform on Fediverse and is a decentralized social platform, meaning it does not operate on a main website. Instead, you can choose to join individual servers (also known as instances). You can follow and interact with people on other servers, but there is no main website for all Mastodon users.
What it means to join the Fediverso in Threads
If you’re on Threads, you can now choose to share Fediverse. Doing so will make your Threads account and posts visible across all Fediverse platforms, exposing your posts more widely. You can post on Threads and people can like, reply, and repost on Mastodon. You will receive notifications about Threads of Fediverse activity as part of the new update.
This is Meta’s explanation of the Fediverse exchange. Please note that you cannot guarantee that your posts will be removed.
Screenshot by Katelyn Chedraoui/CNET
The ultimate hope is that people will be able to access content on the platforms without needing to register for accounts, Meta wrote in a blog post. When you turn on Fediverse sharing, Meta highlights its legal warning that it “cannot moderate or control what happens to your content on other servers” once you share it outside of Threads. Meta also warns that you can only request removal of your content from servers on Fediverse, rather than guaranteeing removal.
Meta will affect the future of Fediverso, we just don’t know how
Right now, the largest social media platforms that use the ActivityPub protocol are Threads and Mastodon, so if you’re not currently using those sites, it won’t affect you. And even if you are a user, the cross-posting feature is optional.
The most interesting thing about Fediverse and Thread’s decision to team up is what this tells us about the future of text-based social networks. Since users began fleeing X (formerly Twitter), several contenders have attempted to claim the crown of number one microblogging site. Mastodon and Bluesky are two popular alternatives to Twitter, and Threads became another major player when Meta launched it in July 2023.
According to Meta executive Adam Mosseri, work to begin integrating Threads under the ActivityPub protocols began late last year. He wrote in a thread that the implementation process could potentially take a year, as Meta systems “historically [haven’t] “It has been designed with this use case in mind.”
The future of decentralized and open source social networks is a hot topic among experts and users, to say the least. Some Fediverse fans have expressed concern that Meta, perhaps even unintentionally, could crush the network he wants to join. Or, as a former ActivityPub technologist and open source advocate put it, Meta may be more interested in colonizing, not integrating, the Fediverso. Suffice to say, it will be interesting to see how Meta’s entry into Fediverso will be received in the long term and what it means for the future of both.
How to activate cross-posting in Threads and Mastodon
Meta is implementing federated threads in phases. In the initial phase, you will need to choose to share your threads on other federated social media platforms. That is how.
1. Open topics.
2. Navigate to your profile.
3. Tap the two lines above your profile photo.
4. On mobile, tap Account. On the desktop, click Settingsso Account.
5. Tap Share fediverse. Please read Meta disclosures.
6. Tap Next.
7. Tap Activate sharing.
There are some limitations to what can be cross-posted at this early stage. You will need to have a public profile. Threads cannot be published if they include images, polls, restricted responses, or if they are reposts from people who have not opted in. This may change as Meta rolls out updates. In my experience, the Fediverse exchange was not instantaneous: one of my Threads posts took about 15 minutes to load on my Mastodon feed.
Here is an example of my thread posts shared on Fediverse, specifically on Mastodon. You can tell it’s from my Threads account by looking at the username format.
Screenshot by Katelyn Chedraoui
Your Threads account will be searchable throughout Fediverse using the “[your-Threads-username]@threads.net.” Posts you share in Threads in the future will be visible in Fediverse (your posts from before you enabled sharing will not be).
This was my first Threads post that was shared across Fediverse, as indicated by the icon in the top right corner.
Screenshot by Katelyn Chedraoui
You can see which posts are shared on Fediverse by looking for the planet and orbit icon to designate your Fediverse status. This is how we know that POTUS entered Fediverso, without an official statement from the White House.
For more information, check out how to use Instagram Live with close friends and our full Meta AI review.
