Over the past six months, Meta has slowly begun to make good on its promise to make Threads compatible with the Fediverse: The app lets users share posts to Mastodon and other Activity Pub-enabled services, having launched on those services earlier this summer.
Now, Threads is leveling the playing field for replies by allowing users who opt in to fediverse sharing to see replies to other people's posts. With this change, a new “Fediverse Replies” section will appear underneath any post that has replies from your Mastodon server or other federated accounts.
In practical terms, this means you'll see more Fediverse content in threads. Previously, most users didn't see many replies from Mastodon or other sites unless they had a particularly large following or their post was shared widely. Now, you can see all of those replies just by browsing the thread.
As with previous updates, Threads' support for other Activity Pub content is still limited; users must do a Fediverse share to see replies from other apps. The feature, still labeled as “beta,” notes that some replies may not appear on the Meta-owned service. And Threads doesn't yet support replying to those replies, severely limiting your ability to interact with other Fediverse users. (In a follow-up, Meta engineer Peter Cottle added that the feature is a “high priority.”) But the update could motivate more users to open accounts in the Fediverse, a crucial step for anyone hoping to take the Fediverse mainstream.