Meta’s X-like social platform Threads has joined the ‘fediverse’, enabling users to share their posts across participating third-party social platforms.

In a beta rollout announced Thursday, Meta is allowing early users in the US, Japan and Canada to opt in to fediverse sharing features on Threads.

Pinned as a potential catalyst for social media decentralisation, the fediverse is a social networking ecosystem which allows users to interact across different social platforms.

Meta likens fediverse technology to email – noting Gmail users can openly email those on Yahoo (and vice-versa), because those services support the same underlying protocols.

A fully-realised fediverse could theoretically see users post content on a social media platform such as X, while simultaneously allowing followers on platforms like Facebook and TikTok to see and interact with it.

The kicker is individual companies need to consent to (and structure their infrastructure around) the fediverse, leaving the technology largely niche since its conception in the mid 2010s.

With Meta’s announcement, Threads users will now be able to share their posts to other compliant platforms, while people on those platforms will be able to follow federated Threads profiles and see, like, reply to, and repost their posts across the fediverse.

“Our goal was always to build a decentralised social networking app within the fediverse,” Meta engineers wrote.

“In the fediverse you can connect with people who use different social networking services that are built on the same protocol, removing the silos that confine people and their followers to any single platform.”

The fediverse is largely based on ActivityPub – a decentralised social networking protocol which enables participating platforms to share user content with one another while maintaining their own rules, content and userbase.

Threads’ new fediverse features are limited to other ActivityPub-compliant platforms – with the most notable of those being social networking platform Mastadon and blogging platform Wordpress.

A tricky road to federation

Meta engineers said building a federated platform in Threads has presented “new engineering challenges” and “unique interoperability considerations”, notably in addressing the disparities between different fediverse-enabled platforms.

PeerTube, for example, is a YouTube-esque video platform which prioritises video content, while Pixelfed centres photo-based content, Lemmy caters to forum content similar to Reddit, and BookWyrm is tailored to the reviewing and social-cataloguing of books.

Given the challenge of delivering content across differing platforms, Meta suggests it may be difficult for its federated features to be equally available or implemented from platform-to-platform.

For example, Threads’ beta allows users to see aggregated ‘like’ counts on their posts from other fediverse servers, but the initial rollout won’t allow users on Threads to see who liked their posts or any replies from people in the fediverse.

Meta will use a phased approach to build out further federated features – such as posts with polls – and is ultimately forecasting a sizeable, but unhurried, implementation of the fediverse.

“In the future, we expect content to flow from the fediverse into Threads,” Meta engineers said.

“Our plan is for fediverse-enabled Threads profiles to ultimately have one consolidated number of followers that combines users that followed them from Threads and users from other servers.”

Standing out from X

Within a fortnight of launching in July last year, Threads had already grown to one-fifth of the weekly active user base of its competitor X – then Twitter – landing the platform the widespread title of ‘Twitter killer’.

Meanwhile, X suffered a 5 per cent drop in traffic during the first two days of Threads’ rollout – but in spite of presenting a viable alternative for dissatisfied X users following Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform, Threads suffered an unexpected decline of over 75 per cent in daily active users only weeks after its launch.

Now, Threads sits at some 130 million monthly active users, while X remains at over 550 million.

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg insists the platform is growing steadily, but aside from its existing interoperability with Instagram, Threads has largely struggled to distinguish itself from the market-dominant X.

The move to the fediverse may help the platform stand out, but other fediverse platforms such as Mastadon and BlueSky have historically fallen short of attracting a userbase which can rival X.

This may be in part due to the technology being largely misunderstood by the bulk of social media users – on Zuckerberg’s first federated Threads post, users replied in droves with confusion and disinterest.

“Sorry to say, didn't understand 60% of the whole para,” said user deb._.lmao.

“So what’s the difference between fediverse and metaverse,” said user rjy4.

“Just give us one “following” feed in chronological order…” added user screenshottrolls.

Barry Newstead, founder of Australia-based social platform, Memwa, told Information Age while the fediverse offers exciting opportunities for change, it likely won’t upheave the norms of the internet any time soon.

“The fact that the fediverse has the potential to enable users to take greater control over content is a good thing,” said Newstead.

“Will it change the internet? Definitely not on its own.”

“It does make it more plausible for the emergence of a different kind of competitor, or it might be a tool that regulators can use to address anti-competitive behaviour or protect consumer rights – we should dream!

“It could also offer new players like us opportunities to overcome network barriers to entry, and offer consumers, businesses, and creators new innovations that aren’t coming out of the entrenched incumbents."

Meta hasn’t given a timeline for Threads’ foray into the fediverse, but said it will continue to work with developers and policymakers to make Threads “fully interoperable”.

“Building a federated social networking app is a complex and delicate process if it is to be done safely,” said Meta engineers.

“We’ll take the time to get this right and grow the fediverse responsibly.”