Over the past six months, Meta has slowly begun to fulfill its promise to bring Threads into line with fediverse. The app allows users to share their posts on Mastodon and other Activity Pub-enabled services and has launched stemming from those services earlier this summer.
Threads now equalizes these responses by allowing users connected to fediverse to see replies to other people’s posts. With the change, a new “unusual replies” section will appear under posts that collect replies from Mastodon servers and other federation accounts.
In practice, this means that more and more different content will appear within Threads. Until now, most users didn’t see many responses from Mastodon and other sites unless they had a very large following or a widely shared post. But now you will be able to see all these answers just by browsing the Threads.
As with previous updates, Threads’ support for other Activity Pub content is still limited. Users are needed to the fediverse share to see responses from other apps. Still labeled as “beta,” the feature notes that some responses may not appear on the Meta-specific service. And Threads still doesn’t support replies to these answers, which severely limits the ability to communicate with other non-users. (Later Meta engineer Peter Cottle adding this functionality is “top of mind.”) But the update could help encourage more users to open their accounts on fediverse, which is an important step for anyone who wants to bring it. to the mainstream.
