Mark Zuckerberg may have backed out of an MMA cage fight with Elon Musk—thankfully—but he’s going toe-to-toe with the Twitter owner in the fight for social media dominance with the launch of Meta’s Twitter copycat, or even a “Twitter killer,” the new Instagram-adjacent app called Threads. Backing the rollout are Meta’s vast financial resources, decades of experience, and billions of existing users—30 million as of Thursday morning.
Users can sign up for Threads using their existing Instagram accounts, transferring over their profile pictures, followers, and any other information from the profiles. They may have also noticed a reference to the “fediverse” when they accepted Meta’s terms of service and Threads’ new supplemental terms.
It sounds similar to “metaverse,” the much-hyped, very expensive flop that prompted Zuckerberg to rename his entire company, but Zuckerberg isn’t talking about the metaverse much anymore. And the fediverse seems to be a very different thing. Here’s what we know about it so far.
What is the fediverse?
Born from the combination of words “federation” and “universe,” the fediverse is a loose alliance of decentralized servers, including from third parties, that can share data among one another. So while Threads appears to just be another microblogging site similar to Twitter, its underlying differences as a decentralized platform are significant.
Threads, like other social media apps in the fediverse, will actually be a collection of distinct servers set up by users, similar to the way Twitter competitor Mastodon currently operates. If creators of one server want to make their content available to those on another server then those servers become “federated” and can communicate with each other.
Threads will be Meta’s first foray into open social networking, something that was reported on as far back as March. The idea, according to Meta’s press release announcing Threads, is to allow people to connect with users on apps other than Threads. Cross-posting has been around for years, but this appears to be a targeted effort by Meta to broaden the aperture of Threads’ reach to all manner of social media users by not limiting itself exclusively to individuals already on a platform.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, offered an example of what Threads’ entrance into the fediverse might look like for users. “You may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed,” Mosseri wrote in his second post on the site. “If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.”
The capability Mosseri describes is essentially the reverse of the feature that allowed Instagram users to automatically import their followers when they joined Threads.
Developers would also be able to build their own features and set their own content moderation policies and standards for their respective servers. Meta bills this new capability as a way to protect people from harassment across all its platforms, but it’s unclear why this couldn’t simply be used as an excuse to circumvent policies against hate speech under the guise of creating a “niche” community.
A tech giant like Meta joining a decentralized platform like the fediverse seems to fly in the face of its stick-it-to-the-man ethos, not least because many advocates of internet decentralization feel it’s needed precisely because tech giants like Meta have too much user data and influence over public discourse.
“Frankly, supporting Meta, Twitter, or Google joining the fediverse at this point is so completely against the entire point of the fedi that I won’t even bother entering this discussion,” writes one Reddit user on a discussion of Mosseri’s post. “We ended up on the fedi trying to escape these companies in the first place.”
Meta plans to work with ActivityPub, a vendor that already partners with Mastodon and is currently working on a deal with Tumblr. The agreement isn’t finalized yet, but has been referenced in press releases announcing Threads.
“This would make Threads interoperable with other apps that also support the ActivityPub protocol, such as Mastodon and WordPress—allowing new types of connections that are simply not possible on most social apps today,” Meta said in a press release announcing the launch of Threads.