You Can Now Follow Mastodon Users in Threads (Sort Of)
Threads users can finally follow Mastodon accounts. This change, part of Thread’s multi-year plan to integrate with Fediverse , means Mastodon and other compatible social media accounts can now be found on Threads. You can also click the “Follow” button, although in this case nothing special will happen – messages from these accounts do not appear in topics on either the For You page or the Subscriptions page.
Threads will eventually offer a dedicated scale for tracking Fediverse accounts, at least according to a thread by Threads developer Peter Cottle (my sincere apologies for the previous suggestion). For now, if you want to never miss a post from someone outside of Threads, you’ll need to hit the bell on their profile—that way, you’ll get a notification whenever that account posts something new.
This is just a small step towards proper Fediverse integration, but it means you can follow my Mastodon account on Threads if you want (just remember to ring the bell to turn on notifications too). Blatant self-promotion aside, this change will happen next year. difficult time for Threads. The social network is losing ground to Bluesky, prompting Threads to adopt some of Bluesky’s features .
Long before Bluesky’s recent surge, Meta—the company that owns Instagram, Facebook, and Threads—promised that Threads would eventually integrate with Fediverse, the social media network that includes Mastodon , but progress has been slow. During the summer, Threads allows users to share their posts on Fediverse , and Fediverse users can even reply to posts. Now that’s a change, and that’s… something anyway.
If this all sounds confusing and unlikely to be widely adopted, I agree. A cynic might argue that Meta is making its Fediverse integration as dumb as possible to deter people from actually using it, mainly so they can claim that Threads is built on an open platform while keeping it as open as possible closed from the wider Fediverse. . A more generous interpretation might be that Meta is approaching the integration of its product with the wider Fediverse with care to ensure a good user experience.
In the end, the motivation of the company is not as important to me as the consequences. These recent changes do make it easier for Threads users to interact with Fediverse as a whole, and wider adoption of Fediverse could ultimately lead to a more egalitarian version of the Internet. Time will show.