Both Threads and Tumblr have publicly stated that they are planning on joining the fediverse, and from both companies we received some more information this week.
Threads held a meeting, titled “Meta’s Threads Interoperating in the Fediverse Data Dialogue” with various people who are active in the fediverse in some ways. Johannes Ernst shared extensive notes of the meeting, which are worth reading. Some of the items that stand out to me, based on these notes:
Meta’s decision to roll out federation in a step-by-step approach makes a lot of sense from a technical perspective, but does have a major cultural challenge. Many people already distrust Meta, and an implementation that starts with only partial federation of one or two features will likely increase, not decrease trust in Meta. Combating this will require significantly more open communication to the entire community; as Meta again risks increasing distrust in the community by only partially communicating to only some people within the fediverse community.
According to Johannes Ernst, Meta could not provide a clear answer to the main question as to why the fediverse integration is happening, and what has changed at Meta that the company is now touting openness as a strategy. A lot of the distrust around Meta revolves around a lack of clarity of the motives of the company, and it seems so far that it is difficult for the company to produce a clear and concise answer.
Tumblr is still working on it
Tumblr also confirmed that the fediverse is still being worked on. Over a year ago, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg made a statement that Tumblr would “soon” add ActivityPub support. During the year, not much news came about, and over the summer an engineer for Tumblr claimed that the project got cancelled quickly after the announcement. Now, Sarah Perez reports that Tumblr did move over someone to work on the project, but that Mullenweg also cautioned that they have not seen outsized user demand yet for federation.
I agree with Sarah’s take, that “reading between the lines, it seems the company isn’t ready to place a full bet on ActivityPub”.
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