Instagram Threads is truly integrated with Fediverse, also known as the open social web, allowing users to interact with people on other services like Mastodon, or to move their accounts elsewhere if they decide they no longer like Meta's policies. Will I be able to move around? Even now, the answer remains vague. Meta cannot yet confirm if and when account portability features will be added to the new social network's roadmap and federation plans.
Asked for comment on the status of Threads' account portability efforts, a Meta spokesperson said these plans are a “top priority,” but declined to provide further details on the company's future roadmap.
Meta's decision not to prioritize account portability in the short term at this time comes at a pivotal time for the tech giant. The company recently announced the end of its fact-checking program, relaxing its content moderation rules in favor of a crowdsourced community notes feature similar to X's. Platformer reports that the company is also disabling a system that penalizes false content for down-ranking it across its platforms. These changes may cause users to re-evaluate their relationship with Meta and consider moving their accounts to other services, which Threads says it plans to eventually allow.
At the same time, Gen Z users were fed up with Meta's monopoly on social media, and instead of returning to Instagram Reels in preparation for the US ban on TikTok, they migrated en masse to another Chinese social network called RedNote (Xiaohong (book) ). As of this week, about 700,000 TikTok users will be joining RedNote, cracking jokes on TikTok, and saying goodbye to “Chinese spies.”
Threads was intended to mark a new direction for the meta, in the sense that it was no longer trying to compete with the open social web, but rather join it. But so far, there has been much debate about whether Meta's move to the Fediverse (an open social web powered by the ActivityPub protocol) is being done in good faith. Critics say Meta is just entering the open web to dominate the open web, quickly establishing itself as the largest federated client and giving it control over the future direction of the Fediverse. expressing concern.
Still, Meta continues to roll out many integrations with the Fediverse on Threads, including the ability to cross-post to Mastodon and see replies from Mastodon users within Threads. We've also done a lot of heavy lifting on the user education part by including guides and explainers about the Fediverse within the Threads app and on the web.
However, one of the key elements to becoming a federated app is the introduction of account portability. This means that if you don't like the way your federated server works, you can move your account elsewhere without losing your followers, follows, bookmarks, lists, etc.
In a December 2023 meeting between Meta representatives and members of the Fediverse community, Meta stated that part of what prompted the transition to the Fediverse in the first place was that Meta effectively “owned” someone's followers. He shared that this was a user's concern about the idea. (The meeting was not recorded, but community members in attendance were able to share what was discussed, as long as they did not quote directly from the meta or attribute it to a specific individual.)
In his conference summary, attendee Tom Coates noted that Meta said it wanted to integrate with Fediverse to address user concerns about the social graph.
“They wanted the ability to know they could move elsewhere if needed,” Coates wrote, but added, “We felt that wasn't all there was to it.”
Given Meta's major policy changes regarding fact-checking and moderation, and given that there are no signs that the company has started working on this feature, it seems like a good time to take a look at the Fediverse challenge. Ta.
When asked for an update on the roadmap for account portability, a Meta spokesperson could not confirm if the topic was even on the thread's roadmap, let alone when it was expected to be addressed.
Instead, the companies shared that account portability is “a top priority as we continue to integrate Federal” and that “there are no additional details about the roadmap or timing at this time.”
It's entirely possible that Threads intends to add account portability features eventually, but that's not a priority, at least for now, as the company aims to keep users on Threads. Of course. The social network has 300 million monthly active users, up from 275 million in November, making it the largest federated app (if fully federated). It also has 100 million daily active users.
This article has been updated since publication to show that the exact number of TikTok users on RedNote is 700,000, not 700,000,000.