This piece was originally published in Tech Policy Press.
This month, Meta—the parent company behind Facebook and Instagram—introduced Threads, a micro-blogging platform intended to directly take on Twitter. Garnering over 30 million signups in 16 hours, Threads has had the fastest growth in social media history. But from crypto-based systems such as Farcaster to Jack Dorsey-backed, open protocol-based Bluesky, plenty of people and communities are actively trying to knock out Elon Musk’s Twitter.
Setting aside the juvenile spats between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the way in which Meta’s Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, and other projects have chosen to architect their Twitter competitors could be a step towards a more open and interoperable internet. Following in the footsteps of nearly every other recent Twitter clone, Meta has promised to make Threads interoperable with other social media platforms via the ActivityPub protocol.
With Meta choosing to create a more open application in Threads, the question must be asked: why is a company that has historically opposed interoperability suddenly embracing open source protocols? The most likely answer is that Meta is responding to a combination of forces, both regulatory and market-based, that are likely to drive further openness in the future.
