Meta’s foray into the open social network, also known as Fediverse, is puzzling. Does the Facebook owner see open protocols as the future? Will it embrace the Fediverse only to shut it down, shifting people back to its proprietary platforms and decimating startups building in the space? Will it bring its advertising empire to the Fediverse, where today clients like Mastodon and others remain ad-free?
One possible answer can be gleaned from a conversation between two meta employees working on threads and Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, whose company joined the Fediverse by supporting ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon and others .
On McCue’s Flipboard Dot Social podcast, he spoke with two executives who built the Threads experience: Rachel Lambert, head of product management, and Peter Cottle, software engineer. McCue raised questions and concerns shared by others on Fediverse projects, including what Meta’s commitment to this space means and whether Meta would eventually abandon Threads and the Fediverse, leaving a devastated ecosystem.
Lambert responded by pointing out that Meta is working on additional open source efforts, so it would be “very costly” for the company to “take away the ground” from its Fediversity work, as it would be detrimental to Meta’s building work would impact trust with other open source communities.
For example, the company releases some of its work on large language models (LLMs) as open source products such as Llama.
Additionally, she believes that over time, Meta can continue to build trust among those working in the Fediverse by releasing features and reaching milestones, as was the case recently with the introduction of the new switch, with the Threads- Users can publish their posts to the wider Fediverse, where they can be viewed on Mastodon and other apps.
But more importantly, McCue (and all of us) wanted to know: Why does Meta care about the Fediverse at all?
According to its first quarter 2024 results, Meta now has 3.24 billion people using its social apps every day. Do we really need a few million more?
Lambert answered this question indirectly by explaining the use case of Threads as a place for real-time public conversations. She suggested that connecting to Fediverse would help users find a wider audience than they could reach through threads alone.
However, this is only true up to a certain point. While the Fediverse is active and growing, Threads is already a dominant app in this space. Aside from Threads’ now 150 million monthly active users, the broader Fediverse has just over 10 million users. Mastodon, a top composite app, dropped below 1 million monthly active users after Threads launched.
So if joining Threads in the Fediverse isn’t about significantly expanding the reach of creators, then what is the goal of Meta?
The Meta staff’s comments suggested a broader reason for Meta’s move to the Fediverse.
Bringing the creator economy to the open social web
Photo credit: Meta
Lambert suggests that by joining Fediverse, thread creators will have the opportunity to “reach their audience in ways they can’t on other apps today.”
But this isn’t just about account portability, it’s also about creators and their revenue streams potentially leaving Meta’s walled garden. If creators wanted to leave Meta for other social apps where they have more direct relationships with fans, there are still few notable options outside of TikTok and YouTube.
If these creators joined the Fediverse — perhaps to escape Meta’s control over their livelihoods — Threads users would still benefit from their content. (Keyword “Hotel California”).
Later in the podcast, Cottle explains how this could also play out at the protocol level if creators offered their followers the ability to pay to access their content.
“You could imagine expanding the protocol at some point – saying, ‘I want to support micropayments,’ or… like, ‘Hey, feel free to show me ads if that supports you.’ Sort of a way for you to tag yourself or sign yourself up. “That would be great,” Cottle remarked casually. Of course, whether Meta would find a way to get some of these micropayments remains to be seen.
McCue put forward the idea that Fediverse users could become creators if some of their content was only available to subscribers, similar to Patreon. For example, Evan Prodromou, Fediverse advocate and co-publisher of ActivityPub, created a paid Mastodon account (@[email protected]) that users can subscribe to for $5 per month to gain access. If he is okay with paid content, others would surely follow. Cottle agreed that the model could also work with the Fediverse.
He also pointed out that there are ways for the Fediverse to make money beyond donations, which today is often the basis of various initiatives such as Mastodon. Cottle said someone could even make a Fediver experience that consumers would pay for, just as some Fediver client apps are paid for today.
“The servers cannot run freely. And at some point someone has to find a way to maintain the costs of the company,” he emphasized. Could Meta consider a paid federated experience like Medium has introduced?
Protocol-level moderation services
The podcast provided another possible answer to what Meta could be working on in this area, with the suggestion of bringing its moderation expertise to the ActivityPub protocol.
“Many of the tools we have to help people feel safe and feel like they can personalize their experiences are pretty blunt today. So you can block users…you can do server-level blocking overall, which is a really big action, but you’re missing some other tools there that are more like a proportional response,” Lambert explained.
For example, today Fediverse users can no longer filter their followers or replies for offensive content or behavior. “It would be great if we could develop a protocol-level standard,” she added.
Still, Lambert said that regardless of his work, Meta wouldn’t expect everyone in the Fediverse to adopt its own toolkit.
Photo credit: Automatically
“We have built our technology around a set of guidelines, and our guidelines are based on many different inputs from civil rights groups, political stakeholders and just our company’s values in general. So we certainly don’t want to assume that this is now the standard within the Fediverse for how to moderate, but making these tools more available so that people have that option seems like a really compelling way to do it from our perspective be.”
Meta’s plan is also very similar to Bluesky’s idea of stackable moderation services, where third parties can offer moderation services in addition to Bluesky, either as independent projects by individuals or communities, or even as paid subscription products.
Perhaps Meta also sees a future where its existing moderation capabilities become a subscription revenue product on the broader, open social web.
Finally, Lambert described a rich user experience where you can more easily follow the conversations happening around a post across multiple servers.
“I think combined with the tools to personalize that experience, it will help people feel safer and more in control,” she said.