Meta dropping Twitter competitor on Thursday

[bnew]

Meta is connecting Threads more deeply with the fediverse

Replies from other platforms will show up in Threads.

www.theverge.com

• Threads/
• Meta/
• Tech

Meta is connecting Threads more deeply with the fediverse​

You’ll now be able to like and see replies from other platforms right inside Threads.​

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

Jun 25, 2024, 12:03 PM EDT

Illustration: The Verge

Threads will now let people like and see replies to their Threads posts that appear on other federated social media platforms, the company announced on Tuesday.

Previously, if you made a post on Threads that was syndicated to another platform like Mastodon, you wouldn’t be able to see responses to that post while still inside Threads. That meant you’d have to bounce back and forth between the platforms to stay up-to-date on replies.

Screenshots showing Meta’s fediverse improvements to Threads. Image: Meta

Related​

• The fediverse, explained
• How to cross-post your Threads posts to the fediverse

Thanks to this upgrade, you’ll probably do less of that, but in a screenshot, Meta notes that you can’t reply to replies “yet,” so it sounds like that feature will arrive in the future.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also revealed that Threads’ fediverse integration will be available starting today in more than 100 countries, a significant expansion from its initial availability in the US, Canada, and Japan.

Meta has been vocal about its plans to integrate with the decentralized social networking protocol ActivityPub since launching Threads nearly a year ago, with first testing starting in December.

https://www.threads.net/@zuck/post/C8pQC2Ap_7w

Spoiler: social media links

https://www.threads.net/@sinisterpixel/post/C8pTQvRoDNE

https://www.threads.net/@ipedro/post/C8pS2Lmu4Dy

https://www.threads.net/t/C8pZXGVvK8e

https://www.threads.net/t/C8ppJBxPQMD

https://www.threads.net/t/C8pk-Yco72M

https://www.threads.net/t/C8pZF19JLIa

https://www.threads.net/t/C8poYviPh71

https://www.threads.net/t/C8pQC2Ap_7w

https://www.threads.net/t/C8pR6dkJLNv

https://www.threads.net/t/C8pXKLLpbda

https://www.threads.net/t/C8pQROYJOXw

https://www.threads.net/t/C8pRSc-pwCq

https://www.threads.net/t/C8nXEoyygK2

Dave Clark (@bedirthan@dice.camp)

Threads is getting more federated. It's still not fully ActivityPub like the promise, but it's closer. I still wish more instances decided to do the limited connection rather than an outright block. https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/25/24185226/meta-threads-fediverse-likes-replies

dice.camp

Mark Jardine :misc_mtb: (@mark@tapbots.social)

It's happening very slowly, but I'm glad they are still moving forward with Fediverse integration. I created an account on Threads (a few months ago) just to see what's going on over there and the algorithmic feed is a complete dumpster fire. I just want to be able to follow and interact with...

tapbots.social

Richard MacManus (@ricmac@mastodon.social)

Looks like UK folks can now federate from Threads. I will have a play, but I will be keeping Mastodon as my main social account. In fact, I hope to federate *from* Mastodon to Threads, eventually. "Today, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads is expanding their beta for sharing to the...

mastodon.social

https://www.threads.net/@rothreview/post/C8pR-8sOoI6

 

[bnew]

Threads users can now share to the open social web, aka the fediverse | TechCrunch

Instagram's Twitter/X rival Threads is furthering its expansion into the fediverse -- the interconnected social network that includes apps like Mastodon,

techcrunch.com

Threads users can now share to the open social web, aka the fediverse​

Sarah Perez

10:00 AM PDT • June 25, 2024

Comment

Image Credits: Meta

Instagram’s Twitter/X rival Threads is furthering its expansion into the fediverse — the interconnected social network that includes apps like Mastodon, PeerTube and others running the ActivityPub protocol. On Tuesday, Meta announced that it’s now opening up its beta for sharing to the fediverse to Threads users who are 18 and up and who are using Threads with a public account in global markets.

The beta was first introduced in March but was limited to three countries to start, including the U.S., Canada and Japan. In a post on Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared that the option is now available to more than 100 countries worldwide.



With the beta, Meta is also taking on one of the larger initiatives around making the fediverse more viable: user education. Today, many people don’t understand how the fediverse works or what it means to federate your account across the open social web. But within Threads, Meta is offering an explainer that describes the fediverse as a social network of interacted servers, informs users how sharing works and answers some basic questions. In doing so, Meta may encourage more people to explore the fediverse, including those who may have felt more intimidated by existing federated apps, like Mastodon.

Alongside the expansion, Meta is also now allowing authors of federated posts to like and see replies from the wider fediverse. However, the final step of being able to respond to those replies with replies of your own is not yet live.



As this is a beta experience, Meta says that once you opt-in to fediverse sharing, your Threads posts will be available on Mastodon, and likes and replies from Mastodon and the fediverse will be available directly on Threads, too. To ensure the beta is also a good experience for Mastodon users, Meta says your posts from Threads will be available in the fediverse, but it’s only going to federate top-level posts and self-replies for the time being. Other post types, like polls and posts with reply controls, are not yet supported.

To turn on fediverse sharing in Threads, you’ll tap on the option in your Account Settings. It will be labeled “Fediverse Sharing (Beta)” and offers instructions and a link to Threads Supplemental Privacy Policy.

“Our goal remains to grow the fediverse responsibly, prioritizing the success of a safe, diverse, content-rich, and interoperable community,” Instagram shared in an email with TechCrunch. “This is just the next step in our journey to make Threads interoperable with ActivityPub, and we will continue to collaborate with developers and policymakers to make progress so creators and users across services can experience the benefits the fediverse offers, including expanded content reach, further fostering their community, portability, and more.”

With Threads, Meta almost immediately became the largest app in the fediverse, as it topped 150 million monthly active users as of April. The wider fediverse has north of 11 million total users, with 800K+ who are active on Mastodon monthly.

 

[bnew]

What Is the Fediverse? | Meta

The fediverse is a global social network of interconnected servers that allows people to communicate across different platforms.

about.fb.com

What Is the Fediverse?​

June 25, 2024

Takeaways​

• The fediverse is a global social network of interconnected servers that allows people to communicate across different platforms.
• Threads is Meta’s first app built to be compatible with the fediverse to help people join public conversations and find their community, no matter what server they use.
• Our vision is that people using other fediverse-compatible servers will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads profile, and vice versa, connecting communities.

What is the fediverse?​

The fediverse is a global, open network of interconnected, but still independent social media servers, each with its own users, content and rules. Servers share information with each other to enable people to connect and discover new things across the fediverse. So what does that mean? The fediverse allows you to communicate across different servers – imagine posting on Threads and having people see your post on Tumblr or Flipboard.

A helpful analogy is e-mail. If you use Yahoo and your friend uses Gmail, you’re able to send emails to each other because both providers conform to the same protocol. Unlike email, your fediverse conversations and profile are public and can be shared across servers.

Right now, most social networks don’t work that way. People on Reddit can’t follow people on Pinterest, for example.

The fediverse changes that, enabling people to follow one another and communicate across different servers.

What is Meta’s role in the fediverse?​

Meta doesn’t own the fediverse. Threads is just one of many servers that has joined it. Threads is Meta’s first app built to be compatible with the fediverse by integrating it with ActivityPub, the open social networking protocol. Threads will be one of the social networks on the fediverse where content can flow between Threads and other servers.

People 18 and over with public Threads profiles in 100+ countries can turn on sharing to the fediverse. If you turn on sharing to the fediverse, people on other fediverse servers will be able to search for and follow your Threads profile, see and interact with your content, and share your content with anyone on or off their server.

Sharing to the fediverse impacts your privacy and control over your information. To learn more, visit our Help Center, Fediverse Guide in our Privacy Center, and Threads Supplemental Privacy Policy.

We hope that by joining this fast-growing ecosystem of interoperable servers, Threads will help people find their community, no matter which server they use.

What are the benefits of open social networking?​

Open social networking makes content more easily accessible across servers. For example, if you turn on sharing to the fediverse, this means your Threads profile and posts will be accessible from other servers as well, allowing you to reach new people with no added effort.

With open social networking, people using fediverse-compatible servers will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads profile, and vice versa, connecting communities.

Developers can build new types of features and user experiences that can easily plug into other open social networks, accelerating the pace of innovation and experimentation. This will give people more choice when it comes to reaching new audiences, expanding their communities, and joining public discussions on topics they care about.

 

[Skooby]

For some reason I can't access the last page of this thread.

I can. Maybe the alert for this post will get you there.

 

[Stick Up Kid]

This was a bigger bust than Master P’s chain of Yoga centers

 

[Vilify]

I can. Maybe the alert for this post will get you there.

That worked thx

 

[bnew]

This was a bigger bust than Master P’s chain of Yoga centers

it's less than a year since they publicly debuted and it almost has feature parity with twitter, bluesky is catching up too. excluding embed support, threads is surprisingly more available to non registered users that twitter currently is. twitter use to be a very good search engine for users without an account but access is gone and now threads provided limited search results and replies to guests.

threads has way better video quality than twitter on day 1.

Social Media Image Sizes in 2021: Guidelines for Posts on 5 Major Networks

What are the ideal social media image sizes for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram? We've compiled all the latest guidelines here.

buffer.com

Best image size for X/Twitter​

• Profile image: 400 x 400 pixels
• Sharing a single horizontal image: 1,200 x 675 pixels
• Single vertical image: 675 x 1,200 pixels
• Sharing multiple images: 1,200 x 675 pixels
• Sharing links with an image: 800 x 418 pixels
• Cover image: 1,500 x 500 pixels

Best image size for Threads​

• Profile image: 320 x 320 pixels
• Sharing a single image: Any size
• Sharing multiple images: Any size and combination of images

now they're expanding their network so people can get access to content facebook moderators don't like on the fediverse like tumblr, mastodon, flipboard, pixelfed and possibly lemmy, kbin etc.


if Meta implements AI on threads in a useful way they'll be competing more head on with twitter.

 

[bnew]

Oops, a Meta “error” limited political content on Instagram and Threads

It reset itself every time the app was closed.

www.theverge.com

Oops, a Meta ‘error’ limited political content on Instagram and Threads​

The setting limiting political content from people you don’t follow is turning itself on, even after users try to change it.​

By Gaby Del Valle, a policy reporter. Her past work has focused on immigration politics, border surveillance technologies, and the rise of the New Right.

Jun 26, 2024, 9:29 AM EDT

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge​

After Democratic strategist Keith Edwards urged Threads users to check the Instagram setting limiting political content from people they don’t follow, many people noticed theirs had abruptly changed. Journalist Taylor Lorenz confirmed that her settings had changed as well and noted that they appeared to reset every time she force-closed the Instagram app, which we’ve also confirmed on our phones.

Meta says the behavior was unintentional. “This was an error and should not have happened,” Meta communications director Andy Stone posted on Threads. “We’re working on getting it fixed.”

Meta introduced the opt-out setting that limits recommendations of “political content” to Instagram and Threads in March. At the time, the company said it wasn’t limiting political content from reaching people on Instagram but instead simply giving users the ability to stop seeing posts that don’t interest them.

https://www.threads.net/@andymstone/post/C8rf1AduNKo?xmt=AQGzlGSkIsP_RwPSbvW5kg4XT4FI4uWACGDnWDrCtzP3eOg

“Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content, while respecting each person’s appetite for it,“ Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a Threads post announcing the change. When Threads first rolled out, Mosseri told The Verge’s Alex Heath that the app would “not do anything to encourage” politics or “hard news.”

The opt-out setting, however, was on by default, and Instagram never sent users in-app notifications alerting them of the change.

A support page for Instagram describes how the setting, found only in the apps for Instagram, is supposed to work. Under a user’s profile menu for content preferences, there’s an option for political content, where they can turn the limit off and confirm that choice. Changing the setting and closing the app caused it to reset for everyone here who tried it, and we’ll update this article if that changes.

 

[bnew]

Threads hits 175 million users after a year

Meta is focused on stealing more market share from X and preparing to turn on ads.

www.theverge.com

Threads hits 175 million users after a year​

Meta’s rival to Elon Musk’s X is still growing, just not as quickly. What will the next year hold?​

By Alex Heath, a deputy editor and author of the Command Linenewsletter. He has over a decade of experience covering the tech industry.

Jul 3, 2024, 10:03 AM EDT

38 Comments

Illustration: The Verge

A year and a half ago, Threads was but a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.

Now, the rival to Elon Musk’s X has reached more than 175 million monthly active users, the Meta CEO announced on Wednesday.

His announcement comes as Threads is about to hit its one-year anniversary. Back when it arrived in the App Store on July 5th, 2023, Musk was taking a wrecking ball to the service formerly called Twitter and goading Zuckerberg into a literal cage match that never happened. A year later, Threads is still growing at a steady clip — albeit not as quickly as its huge launch — while Musk hasn’t shared comparable metrics for X since he took over.

The first year of Threads​

A line graph showing the growth of Threads user base from Oct 2023 to July 2024.

Chart: The Verge Source: Meta Created with Datawrapper

As with any social network, and especially for Threads, monthly users only tell part of the growth story. It’s telling that, unlike Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, Meta hasn’t shared daily user numbers yet. That omission suggests Threads is still getting a lot of flyby traffic from people who have yet to become regular users.

I’ve heard from Meta employees in recent months that much of the app’s growth is still coming from it being promoted inside Instagram. Both apps share the same account system, which isn’t expected to change.

Even still, 175 million monthly users for a one-year app is nothing to turn your nose up at, especially given Meta’s spotty track record of launching standalone app experiments over the years. Zuckerberg has been open to me and others that he thinks Threads has a real shot at being the company’s next billion-user app. To keep the growth story going, I’m told, Meta is focused on markets where it thinks there’s an opening to take more market share from X — Japan, for example.

For now, Threads is still a loss leader for Meta financially, though it can certainly afford to fund it indefinitely. Internally, I’m told execs are thinking about turning on ads in Threads sometime next year, though the exact plan is still up in the air. It’s easy to see how Threads could plug into Instagram’s existing ads system. And given Meta’s intentional decision to deprioritize politics and encourage lighthearted content, it could be a compelling place for advertisers looking for a more brand-safe alternative to X.

“It would be great if it gets really, really big, but I’m actually more interested in if it becomes culturally relevant and if it gets hundreds of millions of users,” the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, told me when Threads first launched. A year later, the app definitely has more progress to make on the cultural front. But the fact that it’s still growing means Meta has the runway to make that happen.

 

[Morethan1]

 

[bnew]

Meta(verse) enthusiast (@documentingmeta) on Threads

The way that a new text based app has been launched and grown to 175M users in a year despite established incumbents in the space, is nothing short of a miracle and should be studied in business schools. What a year it has been for the app and for this account! Phew. Thanks Elon!

www.threads.net

 

[bnew]

Bluesky is having a moment... on Threads

Bluesky seems to have a bold new strategy to entice potential new users: posting on Threads.

www.engadget.com

Bluesky is having a moment... on Threads​

The rival app has been trending on Threads amid rising complaints about Meta's moderation policies.​

karissa bell

Senior Editor

Thu, Oct 10, 2024, 6:24 PM EDT·3 min read

Bluesky and Threads

Bluesky seems to have a bold new strategy to entice potential new users: posting on Threads. The rival social media service joined Threads amid a surge in complaints from users who are increasingly frustrated with Meta’s policies.

While complaints about Meta’s policies aren’t a new topic, they’ve gained new prominence over the last week amid complaints about the surge in engagement bait on the platform, as well as Threads’ sometimes inexplicable content moderation decisions. Meta exec Adam Mosseri, who runs the Threads app, has said the company is looking into both issues. But in the meantime, there’s been an increase in discussions about Bluesky, the decentralized service that has a very different philosophy when it comes to algorithms and moderation.

On Wednesday, Bluesky created an account on Threads, and promptly began pitching itself as an alternative platform for those frustrated with Meta. The strategy seems to be having an effect. “Bluesky” has been a trending topic on Threads for two days in a row and, at the time of this writing “Bluesky vs Meta moderation” was trending on the platform.

“We're not like the other girls... we're not owned by a billionaire,” Bluesky wrote in a post Thursday. “Your social experience should be yours to customize, not bent to the whims of whoever the owner of the platform is.”

While not the first time Bluesky has lightly trolled a rival (see its X post from earlier this week), the company is seizing on genuine frustration among Threads users. Besides the complaints about blatant engagement bait in their feeds, users have been questioning Meta’s seemingly aggressive moderation tactics on Threads. The company already throttles political content on the app, has taken a heavy handed approach to moderation of the service, according to many users. A number of people have reported having posts actioned by Meta for using the word “cracker” or “saltines,” as The Verge points out. Social media consultant Matt Navarra shared that he was penalized for sharing a BBC article about the viral “goodbye Meta AI” hoax on his Threads account.

Bluesky, on the other hand, has taken a much more flexible approach to content moderation. It puts most decisions in the hands of users, who are able to decide what kind of content they want to see or not, and allows users to run their own moderation services. “We're always doing baseline moderation, meaning that we are providing you with a default moderated experience when you come in [to Bluesky],” Bluesky CEO jay Graber told Engadget earlier this year. “And then on top of that, you can customize things.”

Whether the new attention on Bluesky will result in a significant number of departures to the service is so far unclear. Bluesky currently has about 10.8 million users, according to a dashboard tracking its growth, And while it’s not clear how many new people arrived in the last couple days, it suggests there’s been a bit of a surge over the past month as Bluesky previously grew to about 8.8 million users immediately following the shutdown of X in Brazil last month.

 

[bnew]

Mrs. Vanilla (@aburridavanilla) on Threads

Here’s the post about my cat that was removed several weeks before my old account was suspended. His name is really and truly… ya know, the crispy snack that goes well with cheese. I’m not kidding. Crackergate2024

www.threads.net

K. Scott Stewart (@cult_papa) on Threads

There it is

www.threads.net

Search • Threads

www.threads.net