Threads’ presence in the fediverse has been the elephant in the room since it was announced last July. Now that it’s actually happening, there is as much skepticism as excitement. Why is Threads doing this?
On March 21, Meta’s Threads entered the fediverse. This means that people on other ActivityPub-powered platforms, like Mastodon, can follow federated Threads profiles and see, like, reply to, and repost posts from the fediverse. (Eventually, you’ll be able to follow other fediverse accounts from Threads, too.) It’s still early days, but Threads’ entry shows the ecosystem coming together at a larger scale, starting with the promise of interoperability.
Threads’ presence in the fediverse has been the elephant in the room since it was announced in July 2023. Now that it’s actually happening, there is as much skepticism as excitement. Why is Threads doing this? How is the team working with the community? How are they thinking about moderation, monetization and privacy in these early days and going forward?
In this episode of Dot Social, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue talks to two key leaders tasked with building the Threads experience: Rachel Lambert, Director of Product Management, and Peter Cottle, Software Engineer. Both are long-time Meta employees with a genuine care for open-source software and communities, as well as trust and safety. In fact, Rachel launched the Oversight Board, which helps Meta be accountable for trust and safety decisions across its social apps.
Highlights of this conversation:
• Meta’s motivations
• How foundational is the fediverse for Threads (vs. it being a “feature”)
• Deciding to use ActivityPub instead of another protocol
• Threads’ roadmap and next step
• Addressing community concerns around seriousness of investment, moderation, monetization and more
• Future of interoperability within Meta
🔎 You can follow Rachel at @rklambo@threads.net and Peter at @pcottle@threads.net
✚ You can follow Mike on Mastodon at @mike@flipboard.social and @mike@flipboard.com, and on Threads at @mmccue@threads.net
💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up here: http://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave
This transcript was generated by AI, which may affect its accuracy. As such, we apologize for any errors in the transcript or confusion in the dialogue.
In March, Meta’s Threads entered the fediverse. So now, if you’ve federated on Threads, your profile and posts can be followed and engaged with via other platforms like Mastodon. It’s still early, but Threads’ entry shows the fediverse ecosystem coming together at a larger scale.
From a company known to be the ultimate walled garden, this is a big deal. Why is Meta doing this? How is the Threads team collaborating with the fediverse community? And what do they have to say to skeptics who might worry about “rug pulls,” moderation challenges, and other concerns?
Welcome to Dot Social, the first podcast to explore the world of decentralized social media. Each episode, host Mike McCue talks to a leader in this movement; someone who sees the Fediverse’s tremendous potential and understands that this could be the Internet’s next wave.
Today, Mike’s talking to two key Threads leaders: Rachel Lambert, Director of Product Management, and Peter Cottle, Software Engineer. Both are long-time Meta employees who’ve expressed a genuine care for open-source software and communities, as well as trust and safety. In fact, Rachel launched the Oversight Board, which helps Meta be accountable for trust and safety decisions across its social apps.
We hope you enjoy this conversation.
Mike McCue:
Rachel Peter, welcome to Dot Social.
Rachel Lambert:
Thank you. Excited to be here.
Mike McCue:
It is so so exciting to talk to you guys. Congratulations on not just the launch of Threads, but the beginning of the work you guys have done to federate.
Peter Cottle:
Yeah, it's been a long journey. But our first milestone is out. So super exciting.
Mike McCue:
I can't wait. We're gonna get into that. And I'm really excited to talk a little bit about you know, how it's going where it's going. But before we get into that, I think the thing that people really want to understand is, why are you doing this?
Rachel Lambert:
Yeah, it's a really good question. We've been talking about it since really since before, reds launched as, hey, this is an app that we want to see integrated with the fediverse. And I think there's two key reasons why this is important for us. First, it's just really spiritually aligned with what fediverse is trying to do overall, are trying to be the best place for people to have relevant public conversations, be able to have a lot of those conversations even in more real time. And that means really being able to help people find the audiences that are best for those conversations. And we think that there's opportunity for people to find audiences that they won't find on Threads in other places, like in the fediverse. And that will only continue to grow as an opportunity as the fediverse grows. And then I'd say the second thing is, you know, Threads is still a really new app, we launched nine months ago, we're still doing a lot of like basic feature development and making sure that people are having a really great experience on the app. So we're still looking for what are those pillar features that are going to help us differentiate and we think better versus a really compelling way for especially creators to be able to own their audiences in ways that they aren't able to own on other other apps? today? So we think that there's like, really exciting opportunity here. We know, fediverse is still you know, in the in the early stages, but in like starting to enter into its golden years really need to be at it early.
Peter Cottle:
Yeah, if I would just add also, like, I think it matches met as a company, our investment in open source and open protocols. And so I think, you know, if you look at it in isolation, it actually matches a lot with what we're doing with pytorch and Lama. So just kind of rule from the engineering side that like we're coming back to open source, but now in an open protocol with this product.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, you guys are certainly contributed a lot of open source over the years, and continue to do so. We're actually we're looking at React Native right now as a great, you know, a fantastic contribution on that front. So, yeah. So did when you were thinking about creating Threads on was the fediverse, something that was a part of that thinking? In other words, how foundational is the metaverse for Threads versus how much of it is a feature for Threads?
Rachel Lambert:
I would say very foundational, this was in this actually predates my participation in Threads on the team. But the team was talking about this really, since very, very early stages. And that was part of a lot of the team's thinking and how is this actually going to get integrated into the app experience overall? And, you know, part of this has just been about how do we think about opening this set of features and functionality up for people in a responsible way? Because working within the fediverse is a really different way of experiencing the app. It's a really different set of expectations around how to share content and what that's going to look like and what that means for you know, be deleted on Threads. What happens in the fediverse there's just a lot of like new things to introduce people to and that's been where we're spending our time as both figuring out how do we introduce this in a way to users that they can understand and make this feel like something that they can opt into and really learn and be able to control that part of their experience. And also setting the right expectations for what happens when you are a federated user.
Peter Cottle:
One of the one of actually, the earliest documents I prepped for leads when we were thinking about Threads was ActivityPub, like a one pager primer on how it works, and what value can add and like, is there existing product market fit for it. And so it's been foundational, since like the very early days of us building Threads, at least on the engineering side. That's why it was in the optimum flow, or like, kind of like the onboarding steps at launch. And we wanted to baby be like, a little more integrated. When we first launched, there's a lot of things to do to get the app out the door. But now we're like really excited to where we are now.
Mike McCue:
So you guys have obviously looked at Bluesky and what they're doing with that protocol and so on. Was AP Protocol, or other Federation protocols ever into consideration? Or was it you know, just was it clear to you that activity, pub was the right way to go for what you want to do?
Peter Cottle:
I think early on, we kind of just looked at ActivityPub, because it's from a standards organization, and from the W three C, and it's also kind of been battle tested. So it's like 10 years old, which you could say is like, nice because it's had development, and people have kind of like, built products on it. So it's kind of been activitypub. From the beginning. I do think Bluesky has some interesting things going on with data portability with it in the app protocol. kinda excited to see if that could be like ported over to ActivityPub and some kind of way. Yeah, but um, yeah, I just think from the standards organization standpoint, it made sense to go with.
Rachel Lambert:
Yeah, so that's where, you know, most of the users are today, like, it wasn't even available at the time when we were thinking about being able to do this federation work to provide user value right out the door, then we also want to be able to see like, Where where are the audiences? Mm hmm.
Mike McCue:
So so it sounds like it was very foundational, this concept of Federation that, you know, you were been helping to build a larger social web through the launch of Threads. That's bigger than Threads itself, right. And Threads as a key participant in that. Is that a fair characterization?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Mike McCue:
incredibly exciting to hear, you know, as somebody who, you know, worked on the web in the early days, I know that it's incredibly important to have large players adopt that, right. You know, Microsoft adopted the web, when I was at Netscape. And it was a competitive challenge for Netscape. But it was good for the overall Web. At the end of the day, it made the web, really an incredibly sort of standard model for how you would be online. And you know, hopefully, there'll be other large businesses that will adopt ActivityPub as well, that way you guys have. So that is, I think, you guys having done that has done has been a very positive step forward for the concept of a broader open social web.
Peter Cottle:
Yeah, I agree. But I would also give you credit, you know, for Flipboard, I think like, that's another kind of like, household name that is joining the fediverse. And I think, the more like, it becomes a thing that is associated with the products you already use, I think like, the more and more becomes like, hey, like, actually, there's a bunch of value. I see just because I'm using these apps already.
Rachel Lambert:
It's it's been exciting. Because people just have more choice. They use whatever apps or services they want, you know, people get to go where, where the rules are that align the most with their values overall, and whatever standards are being upheld and these servers or instances, they get to, you know, basically vote with their feet in terms of where do they actually want to be spending their time. So we think that's really exciting. It's also really exciting, just from like a product development standpoint, you know, when you're able to reduce the cost of like, how to actually build up your graph, you can spend a lot more time in building really cool features and functionality. So that's been really cool to see for from, you know, even players like Bluesky, like what they're doing with their feeds and discoverability. Okay, yeah, that's really interesting to see how you guys were approaching some of these product experience questions. And that's where you can devote more of your time overall, when you're building something. So we think that's a really cool innovation story for fediverse.
Mike McCue:
I think, been a really important step. How has the reaction been to, you know, from users, from creators from the fediverse that you guys have seen from your perspective?
Rachel Lambert:
You know, I think people are excited to see that, you know, we're doing what we said we would do along time ago when we said we were going to federate. And we said, you know, we wanted to do this responsibly and methodically and make sure we're getting the right input from folks. But people are actually seeing that come alive. So I think there's only some initial excitement there. I think we've been pretty pleased to see like, what adoption numbers have looked like that even though we're not really at a point where we're trying to actively promote it to people, we're kind of like treating this as a, for people who really want to opt in, you know, it's obviously there. And we're starting to do that gradual rollout overall. But we think that we've still got some things to work through in terms of how we describe this to people, what are like, really the key things that matter for people to understand about the pros, as well as some of like, the trade offs when you federate? Overall, in terms of like, what that means for your content generally. But I think, you know, reception overall has been relatively positive. And we just feel like we've got a much longer way to go on this journey. It's been a long journey. So far, we're really excited to have like our first user facing milestone out, but definitely a ton more that we need to do to develop the functionality and make sure that people really understand the value of it.
Peter Cottle:
Yeah, on the engineering side, it's been cool to see the mostly positive reception, I feel like I feel like people, you know, there's nothing like having the API actually working and JSON actually going across the wire to kind of go from skepticism to be like, Wow, this is actually happening. And I can see Threads posts in my Mastodon client, or in my, you know, like, firefish client and how much value that adds out of the box. And so and one of the kind of, like, cute things I've seen is, people go on Threads and kind of like reply to creators and be like, Hey, can you turn on fediverse? I want to fall over my other client, and then creators being like, oh, yeah, sure. It's like a just an easy button, like, and it's so much easier than maybe like having multiple accounts and signing up for different clients and cross posting between all these different places. So it's been cool to see like, the kind of flywheel of, hey, I want to follow you over here and the craters turn on they get a good experience. So um, yeah, I've been definitely super positive and I've been, I've been glad to see the positive Sefton.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, it you know, I think that the ability to follow key people who are on Threads, and see the posts that they're making they're in Mastodon. You know, in any kind of Mastodon experience, whether you're using the Mastodon native app, or ivory, or inside of Flipboard, or any other app like that, is really pretty cool. I mean, it really feels like a big moment. You know, to actually see it working, you know, you can talk about it theorize, you know, but when you actually see it working, it's awesome. It's just, it's really cool to see. So, can you tell who are some of the folks that have federated that you guys are excited about?
Peter Cottle:
I mean, Evan, one of the co-authors of ActivityPub. So that's great. Mosseri has, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has. And so yeah, I think we've seen I've even seen a bunch just in Minecraft, people turn on pretty sure like a list of like cool people federated that you should start following now we're not necessarily maintaining a list. But there are lists out there already on the fediverse. So people kind of creating lists of like, hey, here are the top Threads accounts you might want to follow. And that's kind of like part of the innovation you get once you use an open protocols that somebody can look at their server and be like, Oh, wow, like, these are the accounts from Threads that are trending on my server and kind of like put up an experience to go see those accounts. So that's one of the nice things that like, once you've turned this on, then the community can kind of like create their own products around it.
Rachel Lambert:
You can also go to somebody's profile and see if they're federated. So we kept that red.net Hell on people's profiles for when they have actually opted in to being federated. But yeah, like Peter said, we're probably not going to maintain a list.
Mike McCue:
So when you so now you've got this piece done. You know, I know you guys laid out a roadmap kind of for roughly a year or so. What do you see as the next step?
Rachel Lambert:
So we do have a few milestone approaches overall. And I think we've, we've been pretty open about some of these. You know, the first step was really just allowing people to be able to publish out to the fediverse and get some feedback on their fediverse content through the form of aggregated likes on Threads. Our second milestone is really going to be about helping you see the fullness of that conversation on Metaverse and being able to do that from Threads to so starting to get a little bit more bi directional and content and engagement that's being shared. So people will be able to start seeing replies on their fediverse posts on the Threads app. And then the milestone after that is really starting to lay the tracks for Okay, now you can actually follow fediverse users from the Threads app and you can also see fediverse content on the Threads app too and figuring out that interweaves with posts and content that people are publishing just directly from the Threads app. That's how we've been kind of thinking about the sequencing actually kind of looks like Flipboard was taking a maybe somewhat similar approach, not exactly those same lines.
Mike McCue:
But ya know, it's similar, it's a similar set of steps. You know, I think that from a technology point of view, there's a lot to implement, right. And then there's a lot to do from a user experience point of view, so you don't confuse people. So it's a similar set of steps. But it sounds as though you know, when things are kind of, completely, I guess, they're never really complete. But when you're, you're looking to get to this point where people who are on Threads, and follow people in the fediverse, and people in the fediverse, can follow and interact and engage with people who are on Threads, that's really the end state you're striving to.
Peter Cottle:
Yeah, that's something the North Star, and I'd even add that like, in an ideal world, eventually, kind of in your home feed, you see Threads, content and fediverse content, you know, like, sitting right next to each other. And kind of like, it's just a consumption experience. It's like not, you don't have the mental model of like, what's outside Threads and what's inside Threads, good content from people you follow, regardless of the platform. So something like a further north star, but um, I think that's like, definitely.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, that's exciting. So now there are folks who do have some concerns or fears about federation in general and federation as it relates to Threads and meta more broadly. So I'm sure I mean, I know you guys have heard this feedback. You've also I think, done a really fantastic job at reaching out and talking to people and listening. I love the fact that you were at fed a forum. It's a very kind of grassroots small, you know, crew of people who very much care about the fediverse. And, you know, I think there was some fantastic conversation, people were fairly vocal about both their support and their concerns. And I think you guys did a great job listening. What what do you you know, what are some of the I guess one of the concerns that people have is that you could just decide, you know, what, we're not going to do this. We're gonna we're gonna run poll, as they say. This seems very foundational, though. So it seems like it'd be actually kind of hard to run bull. But what do you tell people when they say that they're worried about something like that, like, they'll start to get, they'll start to count on Threads Federation? And then one day, perhaps it wouldn't, it would no longer be applicable?
Rachel Lambert:
Yeah, I think we've, we've definitely heard a fair share of skepticism around Meta being in this space. I think there's, frankly, like a lot of skepticism for almost anything that a big tech company does these days.
Mike McCue:
And in some cases with the fediverse, any company,
Rachel Lambert:
Right, actually. And that's, that's really influenced how we've been thinking about our go to market for this overall, to your point, we've been trying to get out of the building and understand a lot of these concerns of brands and be able to plan and design for a lot of these, getting feedback on our approaches, like really all the way down to pixel level designs with with other companies and with policy stakeholders, and others as well. I think there's no part of this is going to be, we hope to be able to continue to build trust and confidence with people by showing our actions and continuing to release these milestones and more features and functionality. And I'm trying to approach this as good citizens.
Peter Cottle:
Yeah, I'd say also just kind of hearing from Adam Mosseri, himself. And I think he's always been into like supporting creators and giving creators right tools. And also, he's kind of a creator himself, and he understands the value in owning your audience.
Rachel Lambert:
I might also just add one more thought on that, that, you know, us pulling the rug on something that there's still a very high cost to that. And as Peter was talking about before, we have a lot of these other open source efforts and ways that we work with developer technical communities generally and doing one thing that is detrimental to the rest of the story that we're trying to build, or how we work with those folks. That's, that's something that we should be taking very seriously. So it's not quite pulling out.
Peter Cottle:
I’ll add on to your add on, which is because you know, we're a larger Tech Tech company, you'd say, we have to think through every single thing before we do something like this. In some ways, it's almost a miracle. We made it to this milestone, and we're like, moving forward and more. So I think in some ways, like sure it took longer than maybe a smaller company can move on the flip side, that means we've kind of gone to every single stakeholder and gotten approval and gone alignment and then gone to market so um, something I would kind of say in terms of like, that's maybe the downside or the upside of moving slow is that like, we're committed now. uphold our commitments.
Mike McCue:
It's not like you guys are some rogue group in meta and then Mark's gonna be like, What the heck? What do you what are you guys doing? Are you know, stop doing? It seemed well aware of what we're doing. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, it was certainly meaningful that he posted from his own account that, you know, Federation was starting to happen. So, I mean, do you see the concept of Federation more broadly as it relates to met it in the future as it relates to, you know, Instagram and other social products you guys have? Is this? Is this the kind of thing that you would potentially look at for looking at more ways to create interoperability with those offerings?
Rachel Lambert:
Yeah, I think we're still very early stage on figuring this out for Threads. And there's a reason why we started it with Threads to like one is, it's just an earlier stage app. So frankly, introducing something like this is a lot easier when we're still building the plane, so to speak. Yeah. But also, we've just got a lot to learn about what does this mean? What does this look like? How are people reacting and responding to this overall? So I think that's going to be our focus for probably a good long while.
Peter Cottle:
Yeah, yeah. And I'd also say like, one of the reasons why we added you, or allowed you to have a different privacy setting on Threads is that we knew as we had more of a public conversation type experience, so I'm private on Instagram, but public on Threads internet's like a really nice value add that, like, I can kind of have my public discourse area, and then for photos and stories, and you know, like my profile grid, I share that to just kind of my private followers. And so right, I think the fediverse makes more sense for like a public open discourse of like, the sweet of the family, man.
Mike McCue:
Mm hmm. Yeah. And, of course, another thing that people are concerned about is moderation, safety, you know, there's really, we saw this same set of concerns when Ryan was talking about bridging Bluesky, and, and the fediverse or Mastodon, an ActivityPub. So you know, whenever you have, you have these different technology platforms that tend to have a different type of community on it, now you have communities coming together and intersecting. So there's always going to be some amount of disruption there or concern. One of the things I think I hear is a common theme is this concern that somebody's posts that they make on Mastodon could end up in Threads, and then there could be some toxic, you know, activity around their post on Threads, or vice versa, that there could be somebody from Threads that could, you know, introduce toxicity into, you know, the Mastodon realm. Of course, Mastodon has plenty of, you know, toxic players as well. So, there's a huge amount of work that's been done around moderation and safety inside of Mastodon. And more to do still, obviously, there's a lot more to do. What are your you know, what are some of your guys thoughts as it relates to those kinds of concerns?
Rachel Lambert:
Yeah, so I think, to start, it's, you know, it's kind of like the blessing and curse of fediverse, is you're gonna have different rule books for each of the different servers or apps that are getting built on the protocol overall, I think one of the things that we've talked about as part of our customer safety conversations is, a lot of the instruments that we have for people to feel safe, and to feel like they're able to personalize their experience are pretty blunt today. So you know, you can block users, you can do their blocking, like, you can do server level blocking overall, which was a really big action, kind of missing some other tools in there that are a little bit more like proportional response. You know, even things like user to server blocking, if you're seeing like, Hey, I'm getting a bunch of replies from people who, you know, maybe operator behavior or saying things that are more offensive to me, or that I just don't want to opt into, like, people should be able to have those levels of controls, we think, and that would be great for us to develop as more of a standard at the protocol level that is able to support over time. I think, yeah, the other part of this is, you know, one of the downsides of where we are in our milestones overall, is you post something on Threads that ends up in fediverse. How do you actually figure out where that content went? And how can I follow the conversation that's happening around that post that is existing potentially on multiple different servers at this point. And that's, you know, part of that user experience starts to get better, the more bi directional you can make some of this integration. So at the point where I can actually see my fediverse content and all the replies on it and be able to go back and forth with those replies and being being able to do that all in the same spot. I think that in combination with these tools that allow you to personalize that experience a lot more will help make that a lot easier for people and help people feel more safe and secure. control?
Mike McCue:
Do you, do you see, you know, some of the technologies and learnings and capabilities you guys have had as potentially open sourcing some of those things or contributing those, you know, more broadly, in a way that, you know, could benefit moderation, the decentralized moderation of the fediverse? More broadly?
Peter Cottle:
Yeah, it's definitely something that's, you know, our integrity kind of experts on the team on Threads have chatted with a bunch of folks, sometimes at the data dialogue semesters out in the industry about this, I think there's still a little bit to be determined on, like, what is the most practical way to do it? You know, are you offering the model, you're offering the tools, you're offering the label service service, but I think it's one of the nice things about us entering the fediverse Is it kind of is like spring, that conversation, like, we have kind of a world class ability to provide a safe experience. And like, Are there admins out there who would like to work with us to bring that safe experience to their server?
Rachel Lambert:
Yeah, I don't think we have any specifics right now. But to Peter's point, definitely something that we've been in an active conversation with. And even like, the crawl version of that is just what are some signals that we can share back with server admins about behavior, trends, patterns, or even specific examples that we're seeing. But also recognizing like, this is also where we're trying to do our diligence beforehand, not also might want to hear from us. So?
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I think that's incredibly exciting. You know, one of the things that is powerful about the fediverse is that there are 1000s of instances, all around the world. And the those instance, owners are effectively moderators. And they are making decisions locally, based on you know, what they believe to be good content versus bad content. And so giving those folks more tools, more capability more shared, you know, ability to moderate, is extremely exciting. I think it could make the fediverse, you know, just fundamentally safer online community, then, you know, any anything else that's come before it? Yeah.
Rachel Lambert:
And also, to be clear, like, this is something that if we were to pursue some of this work, this isn't something that we would expect everybody to be adopting, I think this would be like, it's part of the toolkit, if you want it, like the way that we've built, our technology is around a set of policies. And our policies are informed by a lot of different inputs from civil rights groups, policy stakeholders, just the values of our company generally. So we certainly wouldn't want to presume that that is now the standard within the fediverse for how to do monitoring, but making those schools more available. So people have that option seems like a really compelling path or from our perspective.
Peter Cottle:
Yeah. And Mike, to your point, that's what's so cool. But the composable moderation of, you know, the ad protocol from Bluesky is just kind of coming at this problem at a protocol level prior and saying, like, hey, like, what can we offer kind of built into the system to be able to provide this safe experience? So I think that's like, you know, one of the two ideas, I think we're like, really exciting about the protocol that hopefully influences activity puppet, or just the wider fediverse. At some point,
Mike McCue:
I think this this is, this is going to be very exciting year ahead, because the ability to collectively moderate in a decentralized way, as you say, Peter, at the protocol level, that's a breakthrough. That's really exciting. And I think giving, as you said, Rachel, some more refined moderation tools to users, you know, and to administrators, it's going to be, that's going to also help a lot. There's a lot of, you know, I think, you know, expectation setting as well, that I think is going to be helpful, for example, you know, you might be on an instance that is federating with Threads, you know, like, yeah, we're going to do that or an instance that says, No, we're not going to do that we're going to wait and see how it goes. But you as a user, you know, have on that instance, maybe you're okay with that decision. But you also might be surprised by that decision. You might be like, wait a minute, I Why are you making this decision for me, I want to follow, you know, Joe Biden, on on Threads. So I do feel like there's an opportunity to have like a, you know, perhaps, instances that are sort of labeled, you know, these are community instances versus these are, you know, public instances or something along those lines that help give people a better sense of what they're getting. And they're not surprised then by you know, why What do you mean, somebody can't find me? I thought so anybody can find me, right? So this is the this is some of the stuff I think the fediverse needs to do. As we you know, as we continue to grow up here and evolve.
Peter Cottle:
Yeah, Definitely, and I think that's one of the advantages that activitypub provides is that you can kind of just be hanging out on your server and be like, I don't want to be exposed to other servers and effectively Threads profiles that don't opt in or that are private or in that state. And you can have like a great private experience on Threads if you want to, or you can go public, or you can go public plus fediverse. And I think that's one of the tricky things about the app protocols. It's like, everything's public kind of forever. Right. And so I think it's, that's what's another reason why they actually just made a lot better of a of a match.
Mike McCue:
Well, you know, Now, one other fear I've heard from folks, and I think it's a well placed fear is the concept of surveillance economy emerging in the fediverse, you know, concern about privacy concern about, you know, data being used to monetize, you know, surveillance happening in a way that, you know, is incredibly capitalistic and not, you know, helpful to, you know, people's own privacy. That has been a challenge on the web more broadly, right? And just across the board with any sort of ad type business, um, you know, yeah, obviously, you guys are in the ad business, we're in the ad business, if Flipboard. Um, there's lots of ways to do ads. And there's lots of ways to do ads that respect people's privacy, but it is definitely an issue that people are very, very concerned about. As as, as they see, you know, companies like Threads, or Flipboard, or anyone else we managed to convince to federate, we gotta get LinkedIn in here. You know, that's going to be a concern. So what are your guys thoughts on that front?
Rachel Lambert:
Yeah. So, you know, in terms of monetization, like we've been saying, we're still in the very early stages of just making sure that people are having a really great experience on Threads. So that's, that's really where our time and energy has been focused overall, I think in terms of our approach, and how we would be thinking about that, like, as we have been with other things related to fediverse, we want to understand like, what are some of the major considerations? What are some of the concerns, we want to be able to hear that from our users, we want to be able to hear it from the fediverse community, from policy stakeholders. I think an important part of this is going to be transparency as well. So how do we just make sure people actually understand what's happening in terms of data practices, generally. But I think there's, you know, it's not just transparency. It's also what are the controls that people have? And I think that's something that will need to be evolving over time.
Peter Cottle:
Yeah, I was gonna add that, you know, one of the things that came up in Fetty form actually was around monetization. And there was an interesting point that during kind of the desktop wars, monetization ended up being an important factor just it being a survivable and sustainable business. Yeah. And not so much for us. But it's interesting, in general, if you think about the fetters, I think there's a place where eventually the fediverse is is great experience. different apps and different servers monetize in different ways. Some do via donation today. But maybe somebody actually makes experiences like good enough that people pay for, actually, there's some clients that are paid already. And so I think this is something almost like the community needs to get on board with, which is like, the servers aren't free to run. And eventually, somebody needs to find a way to kind of like, sustain the cost of the business and be a bunch of different answers to that. But yeah, I think it'd be interesting. Like, again, an interesting year for the community.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, yeah, this is very much something that's gonna require more discussion and thinking, as we evolve, because obviously do need to different types of people in the fediverse will need to be able to subsidize the work that they're doing, whether they're a content creator, whether they're an instance owner, whether they're an application provider, and I don't think there will just be one business model. You know, another another group that I want to really try to go and evangelize federation to is Patreon. You know, how cool would it be if Patreon supported ActivityPub?
Peter Cottle:
You know, that would be amazing, right? So I think they have a mixture of like, public posts on Patreon, and you know, Patreon only subscriber only content. So it'd be another way to like, reach a bigger audience and be like, Hey, if you want more content, like I have kind of a paid version of this content to or other content, so it does match.
Mike McCue:
Absolutely, in fact, Evan Prodromou, after FediForum, after that monetization conversation, you mentioned Peter haven't created a private Mastodon account that you can follow, and he'll give you access to if you give him $5 on PayPal. So the concept that you can do this, right, you can have a whole other account that you can follow. That's a paid access account, right. So, you know, I do think that there's tremendous opportunity here and The ability for people to pay creators directly, one of the original sins of the internet, I think is that the relationship between a person and a website was not done at the protocol level, I see the fediverse with this ability to have a direct relationship with people as a as a core answer, to then treating people with respect, if they volunteer information to you fantastic, just like if you know, somebody walked into my store, you know, my retail store on Main Street. And you know, there's an exchange of information, it's a genuine, respectful exchange, somebody that buys something and leaves and you have a relationship with them, you can email with them. That is really what we're talking about here. It's a much more genuine and respectful way to monetize than what is even possible today on the web.
Peter Cottle:
Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think just what you said around the explicitness of like I'm following this person. And you could imagine extensions to the protocol eventually of saying, like, I want to support micro payments, or I want to support like, hey, like, feel free to show me ads, if that supports you. Kind of like a way for you to like self label, and self often would be great. And I think there already are some F EPS out to actually like, discuss this type of stuff. I think there's still early stages, but it's cool that people are even bringing protocol ready.
Mike McCue:
I think that the thing that is really exciting here is that a huge company, like Meta has decided to adopt and embrace this concept of the open social web. And, you know, it does, I'm excited that it is so foundational for you, and that you have a team that is genuinely trying to engage and do the right thing here. You know, that's the thing about technology, technologists, and the tech industry overall, you do have these very big tech companies. And there are there are sort of challenges with that, but in the companies are people who are actually trying to do the right thing. And, you know, that's one of the things I'm I'm really excited to see about, you know, what you guys have been doing at Threads.
Peter Cottle:
Yeah, and I think not only do we have like a really big team internally and a bunch of people to lean on at the company. But I do want to give a shout out to everybody worked with in the community, actually. So like, we definitely didn't do this alone. We've gotten a bunch of developer support, technical support protocols, support from a bunch of other fediverse developers out there. And even like, on our launch day, we like you know, had some kind of transport layer bug, and we got people to help debugging on their side, live over discord. And so like, it was really cool to see how cooperative the community has been. And it's again, an example like, even us, we can't do it alone. So it's just been awesome. See? Yeah,
Rachel Lambert:
that's the best part about working on, you know, open source projects. fediverse is everybody's, everybody's doing it, mostly. Or it seems like everybody's doing it, because they love it, and they believe in it. So it just makes for really good community building really across across companies across different teams, and really fun.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, I know, it's kind of like we're on like, we're all part of the same product team. It's like we're on Team fediverse, you know,
Peter Cottle:
…dotted line reporting.
Mike McCue:
Exactly. Yeah, it's really it has felt like that to me. You know, we started working with folks in the fediverse, about a year ago. And that is one of the things that's been most striking to me is that it feels like just, it's a broader team that I'm a part of. And, and it's exciting, too, because a lot of ways I remember back in the early days of the web, you just didn't know where it was gonna go. A lot of people were very skeptical that it would ever go anywhere. America Online, AOL was the main way people got on the internet, right. But I remember what as it was developing was like, Well, how is this going to work? How is monetization going to happen? How are how is this good? You know, how is it going to be a secure transaction? All these questions, and we kind of, you know, did a pretty good job figuring our way through those things are things now with hindsight, I think we could have done better, in particular, the relationship between person and a publisher or website. But I think that is the thing that's so exciting now is that we're kind of all figuring this out together.
Peter Cottle:
Yeah, totally. And I think it's seeing the excitement from the web development and web protocols and standards and seeing that kind of moment mirror. Now to the Federer's, like you said is, I think there's like something about developers get excited when we're all working towards the same goal and the same product experience the same protocol. And seeing that success story on the web. I like really hope that's kind of the path. Metaverse is on now.
Rachel Lambert:
Yeah, let's check in a year from now and see how we're doing.
Mike McCue:
Yeah, we'll make we'll put that on the calendar. Yeah, Rachel P or it is just been fantastic to get a chance to talk to you. Thank you for the work that you guys have been doing. I'm really excited. I think you're making a huge, a huge set of you've already made a huge set of contributions to the concept of the social web and the fediverse. And I know there's more to come. And so again, thank you, thank you for being on dot social, and looking forward to continuing to work with you guys in the fediverse. Yeah, totally.
Rachel Lambert:
Thank you and for your gift of the podcast to the world!
Peter Cottle:
Longtime listener, first time caller…
Well, thanks so much for listening! You can find Rachel at @rklambo@threads.net and Peter at @pcottle@threads.net
You can follow Mike on Mastodon at @mike@flipboard.social and @mmccue@threads.net
Big thank you to our editor, Rosana Caban and Anh (Anne) Le (Lay).
To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the fediverse, sign up via the link in this episode’s description.
Until next time, see you in the fediverse!