Over the last six months, Meta has slowly begun to make good on its promise to make Threads compatible with the fediverse. The app allows users to share their posts to Mastodon and other Activity Pub-enabled services and began showing replies originating on those services earlier this summer.
Now, Threads is making those replies even more visible by allowing users who have opted in to fediverse sharing to see replies on other people’s posts. With the change, a new “fediverse replies” section will appear underneath posts that have drawn replies from Mastodon servers and other federated accounts.
Practically, this means that a lot more fediverse content will be visible within Threads. Up until now, most users probably weren’t seeing that many replies from Mastodon and other sites unless they had a particularly large following or a post that was widely shared. But now, you’ll be able to see all those replies just by browsing Threads.
As with previous updates, Threads’ support for other Activity Pub content is still limited. Users need to opt-in to fediverse sharing in order to view replies from other apps. The feature, which is still labeled as being in “beta,” notes that some replies may not be visible on the Meta-owned service. And Threads still doesn’t support replies to those replies, which drastically limits the ability to engage with other fediverse users. (In a follow-up, Meta engineer Peter Cottle said adding that functionality is “top of mind.”) But the update might help incentivize more users to open their accounts to the fediverse, which is an important step for anyone hoping to bring decentralized social media into the mainstream.