While the jury is still out on whether Meta’s new Threads will be a Twitter killer, the app could still upend how we think of social networks. Not because of how many users it has, but because of Meta’s promise to integrate ActivityPub, the decentralized protocol that powers Mastodon and other fediverse apps, into Threads.
Though that functionality hasn’t been built yet, there are hints about it sprinkled throughout the service. For now, the most prominent clue is the “threads.net” URL at the top of each user’s profile. It currently links to a brief message that hints at what’s coming. “Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, like Mastodon,” it reads.