The bad news is: you can already follow accounts bidirectionally between Threads and Mastodon. The good news is: Meta did the bare minimum and seems to have stopped development.
Back when they started on that, we were worried they were going to kill ActivityPub like how Netscape got killed by IE durring the browser wars. EEE (Embrace, Expande, Eliminate), adopt the protocol, expand its capabilities while including propriatary portions of code, and lock the competition out when market saturation is achieved.
The issue is that fedivers residents are a bunch of tech-literate weirdos and called this bullshit the second the news dropped, and are 100% the type of people who make forks as soon as something like that would actually happen. Piefed being the perfect example, this part of the internet is perfectly fine just picking up their things and making something else (and we love it here for that).
Also, Threads has introduced extremely strict rules for servers that want to federate.
Entire Fediverse server applications are incapable of following all these rules, either technologically or by concept.
For example, IIRC, Threads demanded a full public timeline. Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte do have that feature in code. But it’s intentionally turned off server-wide by default, and there’s a very good reason for this and for just about no serious admins of public servers ever turning it on.
The bad news is: you can already follow accounts bidirectionally between Threads and Mastodon. The good news is: Meta did the bare minimum and seems to have stopped development.
Back when they started on that, we were worried they were going to kill ActivityPub like how Netscape got killed by IE durring the browser wars. EEE (Embrace, Expande, Eliminate), adopt the protocol, expand its capabilities while including propriatary portions of code, and lock the competition out when market saturation is achieved.
The issue is that fedivers residents are a bunch of tech-literate weirdos and called this bullshit the second the news dropped, and are 100% the type of people who make forks as soon as something like that would actually happen. Piefed being the perfect example, this part of the internet is perfectly fine just picking up their things and making something else (and we love it here for that).
Yep a lot of us built stuff like this before and will probably do it again.
Also, Threads has introduced extremely strict rules for servers that want to federate.
Entire Fediverse server applications are incapable of following all these rules, either technologically or by concept.
For example, IIRC, Threads demanded a full public timeline. Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte do have that feature in code. But it’s intentionally turned off server-wide by default, and there’s a very good reason for this and for just about no serious admins of public servers ever turning it on.
You can but iirc it takes quite a bit of bidirectional effort to enable that. Thankfully!