Threads users can finally follow Mastodon accounts—sort of. The change, part of Thread's multi-year plan to integrate with the Fediverse, means it's now possible to find Mastodon and other compatible social media accounts in Threads. You can also click the follow button, though not much will happen if you do—posts from those accounts don't show up in Threads, either in the "For You" page or the "Following" page.
Eventually Threads will offer a dedicated timeline for following Fediverse accounts, at least according to a thread on Threads by Threads developer Peter Cottle (my sincere apologies for the preceding sentence). For now, if you want to never miss a post from someone outside Threads, you need to click the bell on their profile—that way, you'll get a notification whenever that account posts something new.
It's only a baby step toward proper Fediverse integration, but it means you can follow my Mastodon account on Threads if you want to (just make sure you also ring the bell to turn on notifications.) Blatant self-promotion aside, this change comes at a difficult time for Threads. The social network is losing ground to Bluesky, which has prompted Threads to adopt some of Bluesky's features.
Long before the recent Bluesky surge, Meta—the company that owns Instagram, Facebook, and Threads—has been promising that Threads will eventually integrate with the Fediverse, the network of social networks that includes Mastodon, but progress has been slow. Over the summer Threads let users opt in to sharing their posts on the Fediverse, and Fediverse users can even reply to posts. Now there's this change, which is...something, anyway.
If this all sounds confusing and unlikely to be widely adopted, I agree. A cynic might argue that Meta is making their Fediverse integration as obtuse as possible in order to deter people from actually using it, mostly so they can claim that Threads is built on an open platform while keeping it as closed off from the wider Fediverse as possible. A more generous interpretation might be that Meta is approaching integrating their product with the wider Fediverse with caution to ensure a good user experience.
In the end, the company's motivation doesn't matter to me as much as the consequences. These recent changes do make it slightly easier for Threads users to interact with the broader Fediverse, and wider adoption of the Fediverse could eventually lead to a more egalitarian version of the internet. Time will tell.
