The users of Threads – the app that is slated to rival Twitter – are coming across the mention of Fediverse in one of its initial walkthrough screens.

“Future versions of Threads will work with the fediverse,” it says. While many are familiar with the multiverse, thanks to the Marvel and DC movies, most people have not heard of fediverse before. Fediverse will largely rely on the ActivityPub protocol, which runs the Threads app due to its decentralized design.

What is Fediverse?

With social media evolving, it is gradually moving away from the centralization and monopolistic behavior of its top companies. Earlier, companies like Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram have evasive algorithms, ad practices, and monetization tools which are rigorously programmed to feast on user data and find ways to never let their loyal users leave these platforms where they have invested their time, effort, and sometimes money.

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Fediverse aims to solve these issues. According to Digit, “Fediverse is a portamenteu of Federation (union) and Universe. It is a universe of multiple platforms/apps/sites with different servers in them. All of these servers as well as platforms/app/sites can connect with each other, letting its users connect to users of other servers and platforms.”

How it would play into Instagram Threads is that users would be able to follow and interact with users and the content of Mastadon. As a result, it would encourage people to venture beyond microblogging and be more into social networking, video hosting, image hosting, or regular blogging.

In theory, users will be free to connect to any server they want. In case they are unable to gain access to their preferred server, they will also have the option of creating and hosting their own servers with rules and policies they like. Then, based on your discretion, you may even ban the entry of some people.

Also Read | What data will Meta’s new Twitter rival ‘Threads’ collect from users?

All of this is possible due to ActivityPub protocol. “ActivityPub is a unified content protocol that acts as the underlying architecture for all these Fediverse apps/sites/platforms,” according to Digit. However, Threads is not yet open to supporting ActivityPub just yet.

The Instagram chief said, “We’re committed to building support for ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, into this app. We weren’t able to finish it for launch given a number of complications that come along with a decentralized network, but it’s coming”.