Threads has begun its wider beta test of publishing to the fediverse. You can follow accounts that are part of the test from Mastodon, and even see them interact with each other.

Here’s Evan Prodromou’s post on Threads, and you can see it if you search for evanprodromou@threads.net from my Mastodon instance. It’s pretty nice!

Nice is actually an understatement: I’m super-excited to see a company like Meta begin to embrace these kinds of open standards. While the Threads API itself will not allow anyone to build their own Threads app, anyone can build their own fediverse app, without asking for permission, featuring every fediverse-compatible profile as well as every profile on every other fediverse-compatible service.

The other day The 19th joined the fediverse without having to build its own integration: by maintaining a profile on Flipboard, it could automatically be followed and interacted with on Mastodon (and soon, Threads). That’s also pretty cool.

It really does feel like it’s all happening: a new social layer to the web. I’m pretty excited.