Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram and Threads about the integration to the Fediverse:
"So everything has become at least three, if not six, or seven times more difficult than we thought. But we're committed to it, and we're making progress. We have some announcements coming soon. We just gotta get the basics out. You’ve got to be able to not only post to the fediverse, but to get your replies in the app. Ideally, you should be able to follow accounts from the fediverse in Threads, not just follow Threads accounts on Mastodon servers or clients. So there's still plenty of work to do. But I do believe the world is going to become more open over time. And we should lean into that. And if it takes time, it takes time."
https://www.platformer.news/threads-175-million-users-adam-mosseri-interview/
"Ideally, you should be able to follow accounts from the fediverse in Threads..." WTF. If you can't do this, it's a roach motel. Lock-in remains. Big accounts will know they can't ever leave and have a large audience. All positive feelings about them joining was built on this, that they were bringing a huge audience to us.
What's hard about it? I doubt it's technical. Meta just knows it means they'd be losing out on exposing people to algos and ads and data mining them.
@wjmaggos He literally states the challenges in the interview - it is technical:
"It is proving very difficult just to do the basics, particularly from a compliance and a privacy perspective. The standards we're held to are just different, based on our scale. (That's reasonable, that's not a complaint.) And there's a lot of requirements around the world around data separation, around integrity and safety, around all sorts of things that become exponentially more complicated when you're importing data from other servers, which have different rules, that actually are designed to have different rules. "
I have high hopes for them to scale it. It's nowhere near usable yet in pre-beta.
I have hopes. I doubt that if they really wanted to solve this, they couldn't (to the degree it would hurt their business of course). "ideally" makes me think they think it might not happen. that's a change afaik.
(yes, I haven't gotten to it yet. responded to your quote)
@wjmaggos One can be doubtful, but I am an optimist. They have a dedicated team for Threads and the Fediverse. It would be strange to endorse it if implementing fully was never a goal. @tchambers has actually written a lot about this topic: https://www.timothychambers.net
I’m optimistic that they’re really trying but I’m doubtful that it’s entirely by choice. I suspect they’ve seen the need to preempt interoperability regulations set by the EU’s DMA, and they’re using it as an opportunity.