Threads Begins Testing Interoperability With Other Platforms

Meta-owned social media platform Threads has begun tests related to its previously announced plans to make posts available on other platforms as well.

“Starting a test where posts from Threads accounts will be available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Wednesday (Dec. 13) post on Threads. “Making Threads interoperable will give people more choice over how they interact and it will help content reach more people. I’m pretty optimistic about this.”

When launching Threads in July, Meta said it planned to make the platform compatible with ActivityPub — an open social networking protocol — which would make Threads interoperable with Mastodon, WordPress and other apps that support the protocol.

After Threads gained 10 million sign-ups within seven hours of its July 6 debut, Zuckerberg said the platform aimed to up that total to more than 1 billion people.

By comparison, Twitter, which has since been rebranded X, had more than 300 million users at the time.

“There should be a public conversations app with 1 billion-plus people on it,” Zuckerberg said in a July 6 post on Threads. “Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”

The new platform took advantage of Meta’s native scale and was launched in more than 100 countries in both iOS and Android versions, Amias Gerety, partner at QED Investors, told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in an interview posted on July 13.

“Right now, every person who’s in the content game is saying, ‘Wait a minute, I rank as the 15 millionth most important content creator on Twitter. If I jump to Threads now, I could be the 500th most important,’” Gerety said.

About three weeks after the launch of Threads, on July 28, Threads had lost over half its users and rolled out its first major update of the app.

“We are looking at adding more ‘retention-driving hooks’ to entice users to return to the app, like ‘making sure people who are on the Instagram app can see important Threads,’” Chris Cox, chief product officer at Meta, said at the time.