Last night Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, quitely announced the next step in the integration of Threads into the Fediverse. In addition to being able to follow Threads accounts from Fediverse/Mastodon accounts, we can now reply to and like Threads posts. Threads are taking a quiet, incremental approach to Federation, but seem genuinely commited.

Why is this important?

Because I believe that Meta as a whole is moving to an open systems approach, not because Mark Zuckerberg is a nice guy, but because he is smart enough to go open before he is forced to by regulators, (or broken up).

The reaction to the announcement on Threads was a huge shower of ‘What is the Fediverse?’. I suspect a big rock has just started to move…

And it has, since I originally posted this, I spotted that Tumblr has announced that it’s moving completely over to run on Wordpress.

So, what’s this got to do with the first bit of news?

Wordpress already has very good plugins for working with the Fediverse… Tumblr announced a move to the Fediverse over a year ago, but didn’t make good on it. Now they are changing platforms they’ll get Federation for free.

Standby for half a billion Tumblr blogs to turn up on the Fediverse. This also means Threads users liking Tumblr posts and probably reviving a struggling platform. The true power of open social media is about to become apparent.