Latest news with #PeterCottle
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Threads expands open social web integrations with fediverse feed, user profile search
Instagram Threads, Meta's competitor to X, on Tuesday launched two new features as part of its plan to further integrate with the open social web, known as the fediverse. Now, Threads users will be able to see posts from other users on the fediverse within a dedicated feed if they've opted in to fediverse sharing on Threads. Plus, people will be able to search for fediverse users directly in Threads. Posts from federated users will be found on the Following tab of the Threads app. They don't appear in line with the other posts from Threads users, however. Instead, you'll tap on a link at the top of the feed to view these posts in a separate feed. Threads can pull in posts made on federated apps like Mastodon, Bookwyrm, WriteFreely, and others, with more services to be supported over time. According to Threads engineer Peter Cottle, users will see the top-level posts from the fediverse in this feed, but aren't yet able to reply. (They can see fediverse replies to their own posts, however, but that's in a different part of the app.) In addition, Threads users will be able to search and discover fediverse profiles in the Threads app, including those for WordPress bloggers who have activated fediverse sharing, Flipboard users, and those on Mastodon, among others. The features are designed to make Threads feel more like a federated app, meaning one that's connected to the wider network of interconnected social media servers that make up the decentralized open social web. Though Threads has not completed this integration, with over 350 million monthly active users, it's the largest app running on the ActivityPub protocol, which powers the X rival Mastodon and other federated apps. First launched in July 2023, Threads to date has taken inspiration from traditional social networks like X, as well as those operating on open source protocols, like Mastodon and Bluesky. Like Bluesky, Threads introduced the concept of custom feeds as well as its version of Starter Packs, to help users find people to follow. And like Mastodon, Threads is more directly tied into the fediverse, allowing people to connect with others who are not directly on Threads. Since its debut, Threads has introduced features that allow its users to opt in to share their posts on the fediverse, see replies on their posts from those on Mastodon, follow users' profiles on other fediverse servers, and see who follows them in return. In June, Threads expanded fediverse sharing functionality to the E.U. after prior launches in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. Meta says that Threads has interacted with over 75% of all fediverse servers since launching the fediverse sharing feature a year ago. However, the company has not yet provided an update on when it would be fully integrated with the fediverse, nor when it would introduce account portability. That would allow Threads users to move their account somewhere else if they ever decided Meta's policies weren't to their liking. It's a key aspect for open, decentralized apps, as it puts control in the hands of users instead of the platforms. Sign in to access your portfolio
The Verge
2 days ago
- The Verge
Threads is adding fediverse content to your social feeds
The Threads team at Meta has spent the past year working on supporting the broader fediverse and social web, and is launching its biggest integrations yet: a new dedicated feed for fediverse posts, and a way to search for fediverse users inside of Threads. Starting today, if you've turned on fediverse sharing in Threads, there will be a new section at the top of your Following feed that takes you to a list of posts from folks you follow on Mastodon, Flipboard, or wherever else you've connected your Threads account. It's very much a separate feed, which Meta software engineer Peter Cottle tells me is deliberate. 'For everything from integrity to user impersonation, just for user understanding, it's nice to have it as kind of a separate thing.' The fediverse feed isn't algorithmically ranked, or subject to any of Threads' rules or moderation; it's just a reverse-chronological feed of stuff you follow. Over time, Cottle says, Meta could mix the posts more, but he's not sure that's the right idea. 'There's actually kind of a different use case for fediverse consumption,' he says, that's more like old-school RSS readers. 'I might want to subscribe to Ghost publications, or subscribe to different authors, so I have this dedicated place to catch up on my across-the-web content, separately from a Following feed or a For You feed.' Even internally at Meta, he says, there's some debate about whether Threads wants to be a fully open social network or should just act as a repository for all that external content. When you set up fediverse sharing, Threads automatically connects to whatever accounts you've followed, but you can also now search for users on Mastodon and elsewhere from the Threads search bar. If you follow them, you'll start to see their posts in Threads too. This kind of easy discovery has long been one of the biggest challenges for Mastodon in particular, since people are distributed across so many separate servers, but Cottle says Threads can do something like universal fediverse search. This is certainly the most visible fediverse content has ever been inside of Threads, but the world of ActivityPub is still not a first-class citizen inside of Threads. You still have to opt-in to sharing your posts, you still have to have a separate account to connect to, and you'll still have to go to the dedicated feed to see what's new. (If you post something and get fediverse replies, those are still separate too.) Cottle argues that this separation is a useful way to understand different perspectives. But it seems clear there's just still a lot of work to be done both on bringing content into the platform and on showing it to users in a way that makes sense. In general, Cottle says, there's still a lot of work to be done educating people on how the fediverse works, and even what it is in the first place. That's why Meta has been a bit slower in rolling out fediverse features, even as the Threads team has more aggressively shipped things like DMs, spoiler alerts, and links in bio. But Cottle says the team is still committed to bringing Threads and the fediverse together — whatever that ends up looking like.
