tl;dr: It works like email, and your posts will have a much wider audience over time.
Audience / Purpose
This is a simplified primer for normals to hopefully convince y’all to use federation from Threads, so I’m going to be generalizing and glazing over details. Nerds, don’t @ me about the technical details of how federation works, that’s not the point.
The Basics
By default, your posts on Threads can only be read on one place – threads.net (or the official app). All your posts live on Meta’s servers and all your readers must go there. That’s OK, but you could also reach a much wider audience.
It’s an imperfect comparison, but the best corollary is probably email. Imagine if Gmail users could only email other Gmail users, and they all had to go to gmail.com to read emails. That’s more or less what’s happening with your Threads account. You can reach everyone on threads.net, but you can’t reach anyone else.
Of course that’s not how email works, and you can send an email from Gmail to any other email server in the world. That’s because they use shared protocols that allows any email service to talk to any other email service. They are “federated” (this is the key term to remember, which basically means different servers can join together to build one giant network).
The cool thing is that your Threads account can do the same thing, though it’s turned off by default. Instead of just posting to readers on threads.net, you can post to thousands of other servers willing and ready to accept your posts. All you have to do is flip a switch and your account will be “federated”, similar to the email example. You can also turn off federation later if you find it’s not for you.
Why this is a good thing
The main reason this is good for you as a poster is that it makes communicating with a wider audience much easier. Thousands of servers and users are waiting to read your posts, they just can’t get to them conveniently!
Your posts will go out to anyone who subscribes to you, no matter what server they use. They can read, respond, favorite, or boost your post just like they could if they were on threads.net. It exposes your content out to anyone and everyone, which is an easy way to build an audience and following.
As a consumer/reader (me), it frees me up from using threads.net and I can use whatever server and app I want to read your posts. I’m not subject to the Threads algorithm, I’m not forced to use a specific app, and I can make sure I see all your posts because I control my own feed.
It’s basically a win-win for both sides.
Why this might not be for you
There are some caveats to consider with federating your posts out:
- The biggest thing is just like email, once a post is sent it’s out there for good. The server that receives your post will have a copy of the content, just like an email. And just like email, you can’t recall, edit, or delete it once it’s been received. (Technically Threads will request a deletion, but the server doesn’t have to comply). You can turn off federation at any time to prevent future posts from going out, but any previous posts stay out there. It’s not that much different than someone screenshotting your Threads post and passing it around, but copies being “out there” is something you should be aware of.
- Threads’ moderation tools for engagement – limiting replies, hiding replies, or blocking users – don’t work on users or actions outside of Threads. So if you have a particularly popular post, while you can continue to moderate that post on Threads, you can’t control who replies from servers outside of Threads. This could be problematic and a potential source for harassment, so it’s something to be aware of as a tradeoff of having a wider audience. It may or may not be worth it to you.
- While people can favorite, respond, and boost your post from any server, as of today Threads’ ability to respond back is limited so it’s a little clunky. This will improve over time as the Threads team builds out full federation functionality.
- If you’re in the European Region as defined by Threads, you can’t use federation.
How to enable federation on your Threads account
Full official instructions here, but in a nutshell:
- Go to settings (mobile or web, both have it)
- Go to
Account - Go to
Fediverse sharing BETA - Click through the instructional prompts
- Click
Turn on sharing
Wrap up
I hope you’ll consider enabling federation on your Threads account. It really is a win-win in most situations, especially for people who want to read and interact with your content but don’t want to get involved with Threads/Meta. If you have any questions, hit me up on Threads (irony) or Mastodon.