You may (or may not) have noticed the impending arrival of Facebook Meta Instagram's new social app. Well, it's now officially coming out on the 6th of July, and it's called Threads.
The main rumour was that this new app would support ActivityPub, which is an open protocol that Mastodon is based on. This has led to all sorts of reactions. From people completely opposed to anything from Meta connecting to the Fediverse, and wanting to block it from their instance. To people that are excited about the potential of the new users that it would bring to the degenerated social network world.
I'd say I'm somewhere near the more optimistic end. Because, there is clearly space in the market for a new short-form text-based social network, and if it's backed by Instagram, then it stands a good chance of surviving. Or at least gaining enough attention to make it viable in the short term.
Regarding ActivityPub and the Fediverse, my opinion is that if Threads fully supports the protocol, then that is surely a good thing. Because, apart from major social networks simply not existing, having them work with an open standard is surely a pretty cool thing.
I do not doubt that some people will not want to have their instance to connect to Threads. This is a totally valid opinion, and I'm sure there will still be options for this.
However, I'm guessing a lot of Mastodon instances won't block Threads. Which means, if you know people that didn't make the jump to Mastodon, you may now be able to communicate with them this way.
Either way, it's a curious situation that a major platform like Instagram would even think about integrating with something open and decentralised. And I look forward to seeing what happens as a result of this.