Meta enters the fediverse by allowing some users to cross post between Threads and other platforms such as Mastodon

The groundswell of interest in the fediverse really kicked off when Elon Musk took over at Twitter, renamed it X, and made a seemingly endless series of controversial changes and decisions. A large number of users sought new homes, and the likes of Bluesky and Mastodon reaped the benefits.

Another recent entrant into the social arena is Threads -- Meta's answer to X. For quite some time there has been talk about plans to plug Threads into the fediverse, much to the disgust of many Mastodon users. Now this day has rolled around, with Mark Zuckerberg announcing that fediverse integration is now available to some users in beta.

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Fediverse integration has been in the works for a while, but Meta started talking about it much more towards the end of last year. Now it has become a reality. Writing on Threads, Mark Zuckerberg published his "first post in the fediverse".

In his next post he wrote:

We're making progress integrating Threads into the fediverse and launching a beta in a few countries that lets people choose to federate their posts. If you see this and turn it on from your profile, you'll see likes from federated platforms appear on your posts here.

In a posting on X, Meta announced the new ability that is rolling out to users of Threads:

For now, fediverse integration is only available in the US, Canada and Japan, and it is something that needs to be manually enabled. You can check to see whether it is available to you by heading to your account setting and enabling the fediverse sharing option.

More information about how integration between Threads and the fediverse is available on the Instagram help pages. Here, Meta offers up some important things to note:

Our vision is that Threads enables communication between you and people on other servers that we don't own or control. This means that your Threads profile can be followed by people using different servers on the fediverse, and eventually, you'll be able to follow them from Threads. Your content and information may be shared with those servers, for example, if you interact with content from other servers or if you have followers from other servers. When content and information from other fediverse servers is available on Threads, users from other servers will have the name of their server added to their username displayed on Threads (e.g. [email protected]).

The servers in the fediverse are distributed and decentralised, meaning that changes on one server may not affect other servers. Because of this, changes you make to your posts will affect how they appear on Threads but may not change how they appear on other servers. For example, when you delete a post, it will no longer be visible on Threads and Threads will ask other servers to delete it, but the post may still be visible on other servers that Threads doesn't control. Similarly, if you switch your Threads profile from public to private, fediverse sharing will be turned off and Threads will ask other fediverse platforms to delete your content and information, but it may still be publicly visible.

The timescale for a wider roll-out has not yet been revealed.

Image credit: Ralf Liebhold / Dreamstime.com