Threads is adding Fediverse content to social feeds | Hacker News Reader

Threads is adding Fediverse content to social feeds

theverge.com

48 pointsthm64 comments

Other comments here (so far) don't seem super happy with this, but I can't help think this is a good thing primarily because of this:

"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."

That's great! Any step we can take away from ultra-algorithimically-optimized feeds, the better, I think. Normalize reverse-chronological feeds again.

Meta can still choose in which order they show those posts...

As stated in the article, for now at least, they wont be.

They also promised there’ll never be ads on WhatsApp. Whatever statement Meta makes isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

Non-algorithmic feeds are a good thing. That sums up my feelings.

When that changes, or it gets plastered in ads, my feelings will be "well that was good while it lasted". Until then, I'm choosing not to doom say about it.

Are you familiar with embrace, extend, extinguish?

Sure.

I'm also familiar with positive reinforcement.

If/when they start touching the reverse-chronological feed with algorithms I'll call it out. Until that time, I'm happy that it's a non-algorithmic feed and will say so.

(It's also not clear to me what "extinguish" would look like here. If Threads starts messing with the feed, just go view it anywhere else you view you fediverse feeds)

Extinguish comes after extend -- eg, the goal is to make their client the preferred client for fediverse feeds for a large number of people by adding some kind of feature that they can prevent fediverse projects from also adding. Then extinguish.

(Edit) Examples:

- Google and RSS

- Slack and IRC

- Google (chrome) and web standards

- Apple (iMessage) and SMS

What type of feature, and how would they prevent other projects?

I'm happy that there's a non-algorithmic feed in a Meta app. I think that's good for society.

I'm not focused on how this means Meta will be the fediverse overlord in the future, once they release some fediverse-killing feature. When that time comes, I'll be sure to rally against it.

I'm quite sure they'll think of something. I don't think most people could have predicted that apple using an "ugly" color to represent non-iOS messages would have such a strong effect. But apple knew, and they were right.

Edit:

To be fair - "extinguish" is not entirely accurate..RSS, IRC, etc still exist - they're just ghost towns.

RSS is far from a ghost town. Almost everything supports it still, its just not used by many people.

It just occurred to me - post your fediverse content via thread and get preferred placement in the "neutral" feed. Boom.

Okay, if they do that, I'll be sure to say "that sucks".

Until then, I'll be happy that millions of people can get non-algoirthmic feeds.

How is this positive reinforcement? It’s fostering threads lock in.

I don’t really understand why you’re so excited about getting something you already get but now packaged by a monopoly platform?

Extinguish here means they start siphoning users off the fediverse. We’ve seen this many times before.

>How is this positive reinforcement

They are doing what I think is a good thing so I said "good".

>you’re so excited

I'm not "so excited". I'm offering a not negative opinion. Weird, on an HN topic about Meta, I understand.

Having a non-algorithmic feed in a Meta app is good. When Meta overtakes the fediverse or whatever because of it, somehow, let's chat again.

!remindme 3 years

> I'll call it out

What’s the point if the algorithm buries it

can people stop bringing up this thought terminating cliche every five minutes, it's like the HN version of that quip about Rudy Guliani, "everything he says is a verb a noun and 9/11."

Any open protocol will always be subject to competition, that's the point of it being open. If someone adopts that protocol and supercedes it because they add stuff that people want, that's how it goes. If people don't want that to happen, they need to stay on their toes and extend protocols quickly driven by user demand. That's really why a lot of protocol based ecosystems get absorbed, they stagnate.

It’s not a cliche if it’s the truth homie. We all know Meta’s intentions.

This ^. Gravity isn't a cliche, it's just how the world works.

but you don't blame gravity when someone pushes you off your bike. The point isn't that it's not real, it is that you decided the rules of the game when you built a protocol. It's like publishing something under a permissive license and then complaining if someone clones your code and does something with it you don't like. if you didn't want it, you should have built a proprietary platform.

If you create something under conditions that by definition must be robust enough to repel adversial use and it doesn't, what's the point in blaming the bad actor

That's fair, and I'm not "blaming" meta for anything here. They're well within their rights to EEE ActivityPub, but I think it's naive to complain about people calling it out. This new is only really relevant to people who care about Fediverse content, and I see two potential responses from that group:

1) Yay! That's great that meta is helping popularize Fediverse!

2) It's a trap.

I'm in camp (2) - just trying to show people the trap before they step in it. It doesn't matter anyway, these kind of warnings have never, ever worked. Just let the old man shake his fist at the clouds FFS :) Where else am I supposed to do it? Threads?

They're welcome to try. RSS is still going strong, and I use it daily. Spotify and ClearChannel are trying to kill it for podcasts, and that seems to be failing.

ActivityPub in the form of Mastodon will probably never be as big as Twitter was, or as Threads could become if Facebook pushes it hard enough, but I'm fine with that. That's not really a place I would like to hang out, and I like my Masto instance.

> 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.

Oh, so not real important. I follow some Threads accounts on Mastodon, but very few have clicked the button to enable that. I've even asked professional organizations to do that and they refused. Mark Cuban complains on Bluesky about their dwindling user base, but he refuses to bridge his account.

Explains the mastodon.social T&C agreement update this morning.

I honestly thought it was talking about the IoT-standard Thread and was seriously confused about how this was supposed to make sense.

I had completely forgotten Facebook’s Threads even existed. I can’t see this being enough to resurrect any momentum?

There's over 350M monthly active users. Seems like plenty of momentum?

I saw these numbers recently too and I honestly think they are fraudulent. Are they counting all the people who accidentally click on Threads as they are scrolling through their Instagram feed? I have literally never heard anyone bring up Threads in conversation, I never see it referenced on other platforms, I never see screenshots of the content there; why is this the case if so many people are using it?

My mum sends me stuff from threads constantly

Do you find it’s mostly older people or younger people who use it?

Older

Interesting. I know Instagram’s demographic is aging but I had assumed Threads would skew younger.

I'd say the young demographic is on tiktok and the like.

Those numbers are a big legal thing because they influence share price. I don't know how exactly they're calculated and I'm sure the most positive spin is used (such as click through from instagram) but if they were actually fraudulent there'd be massive consequences. It's not like anyone is ever hesitant to sue Meta.

Fair point.

IIRC Having an Instagram account automatically creates a thread account whether you choose to use it or not.

Unused accounts won’t show up in the active users number.

Bots, OF Adverts, and Scammers all the way down.

Is there any source for this, bar meta itself? It has no relevance at all. I see bluesky screenshots everywhere, but not many threads ones.

It brings into question, does the concept of a Fediverse subvert having a variety of communities with different cultures?

Imagine putting the Meta/Twitter/Reddit world behind you, posting on Bluesky/Mastodon, and then your content is showing up on Threads next to influencer garbage, AI slop, culture wars, crypto spam, pillow ads.

And just as bad or worse, content from those places flooding your parachute community. Those sites function best now as quarantine.

> then your content is showing up on Threads next to influencer garbage, AI slop, culture wars, crypto spam, pillow ads.

Isn't that the whole point of the fediverse? You're distributing your content to other people and lose control of the context it is displayed in.

But, like many other ideas in tech, it started as a good sounding idea but it's worth questioning now if it will be good in practice. When the idea was birthed we didn't know the landscape/hellscape social media would become in the 2020s.

This already happens. 4chan is mostly screenshots from Reddit, Reddit is mostly screenshots from Twitter, and all of the short form video platforms (Instagram, YouTube) copy trends that originate on TikTok.

It's good when specific content goes viral across platforms. I've seen many good tiktoks but I never want to have the app installed or scroll through it, subject to their algorithm.

It just won't be good when some high quality small or mid sized community absorbs everything posted to Threads or Tiktok, for example. That's when it loses its identity.

I’m not talking about the kind of cross-platforming viral content you’re describing. What I’ve noticed usually ends up happening is that platforms just end up becoming mutually-perpetuating surveillance machines. e.g. “You’ll never believe what these LIBTARDS on Reddit said,” “I can’t BELIEVE what $tech_ceo said about $issue on Twitter,” and that’s where the problem lies. You used to get specific kinds of content from specific platforms, whereas now if you go on reels you’re as likely to come across a subway surfers AskReddit video or a Twitter screenshot set to music as you are an actual video.

Not ideal, I agree, but still not as bad as every site wholesale becoming the superset of multiple sites.

Both instance admins and individual users can block other instances (at least in Mastodon), so if you don't want to show up on Threads or see content from there, you can do that.

Embrace, extend, extinguish. No doubt.

Put a license that charges for the content when taken by a commercial platform with over 1000 employees. Send them a bill at the end if the year.

…so does this mean Meta is receiving my own copyrighted data from my server and storing it on their own servers for the benefit of their platform and apps?

Sounds like redistribution and perhaps public performance of copyrighted content without a license.

> Sounds like redistribution and perhaps public performance of copyrighted content without a license.

Unless they take from a server with a more permissive license that had the right to distribute it...

Kind of hard to stop it since stuff being federated and re-distributed is kind of the point.

I guess you could refuse permission to corporations operating something like threads specifically.

I would be surprised if any server tried to withhold the rights of the data themselves. The point is to federate, and I can't imagine how you could say Meta can't federate but other companies can

I don't see why you couldn't have a usage agreement or terms of service that said exactly that.

By default, all rights are reserved. Operating a Mastodon instance doesn’t grant anyone - Meta or mastodon.social - rights to redistribute the copyrighted content you post that is then federated.

I could legitimately DMCA most of the fediverse right now if I wanted to.

Aren't the protocols used for federation and clients different, i.e. could it be argued when one allows the protocols to be used for federation then one implicitly allows others to also federate?

I wonder if one could also DMCA ISPs providing proxy services, IRC or NNTP on the same terms and be successful.

This is a fundamental part of the fediverse, or at least mastodon, right? There can't be an federation without doing exactly this between mastodon instances.

I, and I'm sure others, are suspicious that F**book will train AI on it, will keep copies and apply their own licenses, et cetera, until someone calls them out on it (ie, sues them).

Me too. However you're free to join or move to an instance that doesn't federate with Threads.

That's fair but the comment I'm responding to seems to take offense at just storing and distributing it on threads, which is exactly what every single fediverse instance has to do. There are also tools for dealing with this, namely you can configure a mastodon instance to not federate with a server.

If someone is more concerned about training models on the data and whether that is legal or not, I assume Meta could easily be doing that already if they wanted to via scraping.

Not offense, just pointing it out. My own Mastodon instance is down at the moment; I need to fix it.

Posting on a server that federates doesn’t grant anyone a copyright license to the content you post, regardless of the fact that you can choose a server that doesn’t federate.

All AI companies are already training on any data they can get (by scraping or torrenting). At this point I don't think anyone will be stopping them, see [1] for the latest UK update.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2025/jun/06/uk-government-si...

>F**book

Out of curiosity, why did you self-censor facebook? Does it keep the AI away, or something?

presumably they self-censored some derogatory alternative spelling, perhaps fuckbook?

Correct. That said, simply running an ActivityPub server does not grant you a copyright license to the content that is federated to you.

Also, most people don’t make money by running an instance of Mastodon. Meta is absolutely using the UGC displayed on their platform to make money.

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