Meta announced that users aged 18 and above can turn on Fediverse sharing on their Threads profile and communicate across supported platforms such as Mastodon. The Fediverse beta experience is now rolling out to users in over 100 countries.
Talking about the update in a blog post, Meta said:
Starting today, Threads users who turn on sharing to the fediverse can see and like replies from people on other servers, like Mastodon, directly in Threads. We are also expanding the availability of the fediverse beta experience to more than 100 countries and hope to roll it out everywhere soon.
To see if the feature has arrived on your device, go to your profile page in the Threads app > tap on the Settings button in the top-right corner > Account. Here, tap on the option called "Fediverse sharing" and follow the steps.
Meta started testing Fediverse integration in December last year, and its beta was rolled out in the US a few months later. It's an open, decentralized social media network built on the ActivityPub protocol. Users from other Fediverse-supported servers, such as Mastodon, can follow your Threads profile, interact with your posts, and share them with people on or off their server.
This is similar to how email allows users to communicate with each other regardless of which service they use. However, you need a public Threads profile to share posts to the fediverse and be discoverable by users from other servers.
While the servers are interconnected, each independent server can have a different set of users, content, and rules. This means the regulations put in place by Meta won't apply to those servers that can use the information at their discretion.
When you share a post to the fediverse, you may lose control over your information. Similar to email, you may not be able to access, edit or delete your information after you've shared it outside Threads.
The company cautions that you can turn off fediverse sharing anytime, but it doesn't guarantee that your content will be removed from other servers after sending a request. For instance, if you edit or delete a Threads post previously shared on fediverse, those changes may or may not appear on other servers.
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