Over the past six months, Meta has slowly begun to make good on its promise to make Threads compatible with the fediverse. The app allows users to share their posts on Mastodon and other Activity Pub-enabled services and began generating on those services earlier this summer.
Now, Threads is making those answers even more interesting. Allowing users who have opted to share on Fediverse to see replies to other people’s posts. With this change, a new “replies on Fediverse” section will appear below posts that have received replies from Mastodon servers and other federated accounts.
In practice, this means that there will be a lot more fediverse content visible in threads. Until now, most users probably didn't see as many responses from Mastodon and other sites unless they had a large following or a post that was widely shared. But now, you'll be able to see all of those responses simply by browsing through threads.
As with previous updates, Threads' support for other Activity Pub content remains limited. Users must share to Fediverse in order to see other apps' responses. The feature, which is still labeled as being in “beta,” warns that some responses may not be visible on the Meta-owned service. And Threads still doesn't support replies to those responses, which dramatically limits the ability to interact with other Fediverse users. (In a follow-up, Meta engineer Peter Cottle adding that this functionality is “the most important thing”). But the update could help incentivize more users to open their accounts on the fediverse, which is an important step for anyone looking to enter the mainstream market.
