Hacker News Reader

Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Pretty ironic that when Twitter was imploding Meta launched a competitor that was fully compatible with ActivityPub/Mastodon while the team dedicated to building an open competitor (Bluesky) created a proprietary protocol that nobody uses.

View on HN

Threads has been promising to integrate with ActivityPub since it launched. To date they've done very little and their timeline extends until the end of 2024.

I'd personally be very happy if Threads gives up control over their users but it remains to be seen. ActivityPub also lacks the very strong account portability feature that made AT Protocol necessary.

AT Protocol is completely open source and the Bluesky network is completely open. The Bluesky network has had an open API for a year with full access to all public data (no auth required):

    websocat wss://bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos

More info on: https://atproto.com

> To date they've done very little

Not true. You can now follow Adam Mosseri's Threads account from Mastodon.

And like you said they are committed to fully rolling it out this year.

Limited functionality for a specified subset of users counts as "very little" to my mind given that they launched 6 months ago and have a team of hundreds working on it.

But like I said, I sincerely do hope Threads follows through on their plan to federate. But it's just not correct to claim that they already have.

Maybe you I and understand the software development process differently.

Supporting one user end to end is a huge milestone and the first step in rolling it out to the other hundreds of millions of users. Especially when Threads isn't a standalone platform but is built on top of Instagram which means we could see it integrated with ActivityPub as well.

The fact that Meta cares about ActivityPub at all is a huge win for open, interoperable standards.

I don't know... the whole Threads + ActivityPub thing just seems like Meta trying to keep the regulators at bay rather than them actually embracing the ethos of becoming a major federated social media player.

So launch in July 2023, handful of accounts have AP support in November-ish 2023, full AP support end of 2024? I guess it's not nothing, they did have to bolt something entirely new on top of IG's infrastructure. But for a team that big, feels like we'd be seeing more if it was a true priority for them. Plus Threads leaning towards opt-in AP support which will only inhibit uptake (that was the last I heard, anyway).

I'd be shocked if Instagram ever went with ActivityPub, though.

To be clear, strong account portability predates Bluesky by ~5 years. Peergos[0], as reviewed by Jay before Bluesky Inc was created, has had this for years:

https://book.peergos.org/features/migration.html

[0] https://github.com/peergos/peergos

FWIW, you can now follow people on Threads from Mastodon and interact as if they're just another Mastodon user.

Did threads launch with compatibility? Because I know a lot of “nsfw” creators that choose Bluesky over Threads because threads rules over NSFW content.

Bluesky wasted a few opportunities they could have grabbed market share from Twitter simply because a) you needed and account to view posts (now fixed) b) you needed a code to sign up (now fixed).

But has their ship sailed? L

Reply on news.ycombinator.com