#Threads wants to be the best place where people have relevant, public, real-time conversations, and the #fediverse is the means by which people can find the audiences that are best for those conversations, because not all of them will be on Threads.
The fediverse is a compelling way for creators to own their audiences in a way they aren't able to own on other apps today.
@mike asks: How foundational in the Fediverse to Threads? Or is it just a feature?
A: Fediverse was part of the planning from the very beginning. There are lot of new things to introduce users to, and also a lot of new things to understand when federating beyond what a typical app does. Like how can users control what happens, and understand what happens?
Rachel: people have more choice when their apps integrate with the [#fediverse]. They get to go where the rules are that align most with their values, and they get to vote with their feet.
Also exciting from the product development perspective: if you don't have to build your own [social] graph, you get to spend more time on cool functionality.
Rachel: people are excited to see that we are actually doing this! So far we are not actively promoting the Fediverse, but the adoption numbers have been good. We also still have some things to work through, like communicating tradeoffs.
Peter: people have been asking creators on Threads to turn on Fediverse sharing (it's opt-in): it's so much easier to turn on fediverse sharing than to post to an entirely different social network.
Mike commends Rachel and Peter and other Meta people reaching out to the community and listening to concerns and feedback, such as at #fediforum:
I would agree with that. It's unusual for a large company to do this kind of thing, but absolutely the right and necessary thing to do when engaging with the Fediverse.
Rachel: fair share of criticism. Trying to approach this as a good citizen.
Pulling the rug out of it now would also impact very negatively the overall story Meta has been trying to build about open source and how they engage with the community.
@pcottle adds that in his view, the fediverse makes more sense for public conversations, as opposed to his example of his own Instagram profile that he has set to private.
Both Rachel and Peter suggest that some moderation functionality could/should become part of the protocol stack. #AtProto does composable moderation and that is really cool. Peter hopes that #ActivityPub may learn from it and evolve in this direction.
Rachel: one of the challenges with the fediverse is: how do you figure out where your content went, and how can I follow that conversation that now exists on multiple different servers?
Wants all replies in the same spot. That helps feel people in control.
This is actually a really good point imho. It's not just confusing that reply trees aren't eventually consistent across the fediverse, but it creates uncertainty because I don't even know what people say in response.
Rachel: one of the challenges with the fediverse is: how do you figure out where your content went, and how can I follow that conversation that now exists on multiple different servers?
Something ForumWG is actively researching at present. A lot of the fediverse is built on reply chains, fragmented ones, but there's a better path forward, and we're figuring out just how to do it.
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