Threads beta allows you to share with Mastodon and other fediverse services

Fediverse support on Meta Threads is up and running in beta. Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Thursday that adult Threads users in eligible countries can now turn on sharing to fediverse — including Mastodon and other ActivityPub services. Ahead of today’s wider beta rollout, Meta has been testing cross-platform compatibility with multiple accounts since late last year.

Fediverse is a collection of decentralized online communities (servers) that speak the common “language” of ActivityPub. This allows each hub to maintain its own rules and members, while allowing posts, likes, and other content to be displayed to others. Meta promised to support fediverse when Threads launched last year.

IN post since December, Zuckerberg has framed the integration as a way to allow the fledgling platform’s content to reach more eyes. “Making threads interoperable will give people more choice about how to interact and help content reach more people,” he wrote. “I’m pretty optimistic about that.”

The function is inclusion. If you turn on fediverse sharing, people on other ActivityPub servers can search for and follow your profile, see and interact with your posts, and share them with users in their (or any other) compatible fediverse community. Their interactions will be shared with Threads.

There are some limitations while cross-platform compatibility is in beta. While likes from different platforms will appear in threads, replies and follows from these communities will not. Additionally, polls and posts with response controls cannot be shared with non-Threads communities. So for now, the integration does little more than push Threads posts to Mastodon and other fediverse communities, along with a few goodies.

You can enable the feature in the Threads app. Head to Account Settings > Fediverse Sharing and follow the instructions to log in and check it out. Meta says the test is only available in the US, Canada, and Japan to begin with.