Over the past six months, Meta has slowly started to make good on its promise to make Threads compatible with the fediverse. The app allows users to share their posts on Mastodon and other Activity Pub-enabled services and start appearing on those services as early as this summer.
Now, Threads makes those responses even easier by allowing users who have opted in to various sharing to see responses to other people’s posts. With the change, a new “different replies” section will appear under posts that have received replies from Mastodon servers and other syndicated accounts.
Essentially, this means that a lot of different content will appear within Threads. Until now, most users probably didn’t see many responses from Mastodon and other sites unless they had a very large following or widely shared posts. But now, you’ll be able to see all those responses by browsing Threads.
As with previous updates, Threads’ support for some Activity Pub content is still limited. Users must split sharing to view responses from other apps. The feature, which is still labeled as being in “beta,” notes that some responses may not be visible on the Meta-managed service. And Threads still doesn’t support replies to those replies, which greatly limits the ability to communicate with various other users. (In a follow-up, Meta developer Peter Cottle added that the functionality is “at a high level.”) But the update could help encourage more users to open their accounts on fediverse, which is an important step for anyone hoping to bring the standard.
Source link
