We spoke with a product manager at Meta to learn how the company plans to bring interoperability to Threads in the coming months. It faces both technical and cultural challenges.
Meta is treading carefully, doing a phased implementation while continuing conversations with Fediverse leaders. This will give the company more time to iron out some of the integration kinks. “Do we adapt the protocol to be able to support this?” Lambert asks. “Or do we try to do some kind of interesting, unique implementation?” For example, Threads supports audio posts, a feature not currently supported within ActivityPub, so Meta is experimenting with “federating” a text transcription of the original post instead of the audio version.
It's far worse. They're making improvements only on their side. The protocol everyone uses will lack the features their protocol offers. In other words, their side of the garden is now greener than ours, and one day, their side will be so majestic and beautiful compared to ours that almost nobody will want to visit it anymore, and like a flame without fuel, the Fediverse will Extinguish on its own.
As I said before, their instance and it's bells and whistles are irrelevant to my instance. Me and my instance only care about The ap protocol. I have no reason to fear their instance as long as it's pumping out the standard protocol. Anything not standard gets dropped.
Oh, be assured that threads will one day defederate and build a wall so you can't access their content anymore. The Fediverse need to have a critical mass of users to survive when it happens, but if the features threads offers are too compelling and the majority of the new accounts are made in there then the Fediverse is screwed.