Here’s everything we know about it so far:
- It will use ActivityPub.
- It will be a side app of Instagram.
- It will most likely be called Threads.
- Your Instagram verification status will transfer over.
- There will be easy discovery tools in place: Your Instagram followers will be able to follow you on Threads as well (they won’t transfer over automatically).
What do you think?
It’s neat to see them using ActivityPub, but I’m really wary of anything created under the Meta/Facebook umbrella. We’ll have to wait and see if they decide to act in good faith with this which my biases make me doubtful they will.
Also, if they’re using ActivityPub, why would I have to join if I can just loop in with my existing Mastodon account?
They did the same thing with jabber / XMPP back in the day. There was a time where I could use my jabber accout to talk to ppl on FB. They (and also Google) turned that off and unfederated. They’ll do the same thing here.
Why would a big company want to use a federated protocol like ActivityPub anyway?
90s Microsoft loved using standards to get a leg up only to try and add stuff on top to ultimately make the people just using the non-MS improved standard into 2nd class citizens.
It was called Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
I have no reason to think that Meta aren’t trying to do exactly this