Written by: Jaleel, BlockBeats
Editor: Jack, BlockBeats
This morning, Threads was officially launched. This is a new application launched by Meta after Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, directly targeting Twitter. Threads is not only named after one of the features of its competitor Twitter, but also very similar to Twitter in emphasizing public conversations. Some technicians in the technology industry even call it a "Twitter killer."
On the first day of its launch, Threads' data performance was impressive. Zuckerberg said that within 4 hours of its launch, more than 5 million users had registered, and within 7 hours of its launch, more than 10 million users had registered.
It is worth noting that before the official launch, many users speculated that they could log in to Threads using their Instagram accounts from the preview of the app photos displayed in the Apple App Store. In a company-wide meeting last month, Meta executives revealed that Instagram Threads will be integrated with ActivityPub, the decentralized social media protocol on which Mastodon is based. This also means that the content of Threads may be available on multiple servers, and Instagram usernames, followers, and other account information can also be automatically moved to the new app Threads based on user needs.
On the Threads login interface, we can clearly see how Threads works. Future versions will add a new type of federated universe of social media networks, allowing users to follow and interact with each other on different platforms such as Mastodon.
Related reading: "First experience | Zuckerberg's Twitter competitor Threads is online, is it really better?"
What is the ActivityPub protocol?
When it comes to the decentralized protocol ActivityPub used by Threads, many people may not know it, but when it comes to the federal social network Mastodon (Chinese mammoth, mammoth or mammoth, etc.), many people know it.
At the end of last year, when Elon Musk laid off a large number of employees and changed Twitter's verification policy, causing a lot of chaos, the biggest beneficiary was Mastodon. Mastodon, which had accumulated about 500,000 active users before Elon Musk acquired Twitter, suddenly received a large number of "refugees" from Twitter, with more than 130,000 new users per day at its peak. The number of active users reached 2.5 million in early December last year, and the number of active users dropped to 1.8 million after January this year, but it is still an order of magnitude higher than Lens and Nostr, which are protocols.
The number of Mastodon users has grown rapidly, and many celebrities have found a "new home" on Mastodon, which has also attracted the attention of Elon Musk. Twitter has begun to ban links to Mastodon. In a Twitter Spaces, Elon Musk directly said: "Fucking post Mastodon all goddamn day long, I don’t care"
In this dispute where users are fleeing Twitter, Mastodon seems to be the biggest winner. Mastodon's founder and CEO is a German programmer named Eugen Rochko. According to data shared by him, the number of active users of Mastodon increased by 294,000 this weekend, and the amount of activity posted increased by about two times.
It is worth mentioning that Ethereum Foundation member boffin Phil Daian runs a crypto community called cryptodon.lol on Mastodon, and Vitalik has also joined it.
At the same time, many people are not optimistic about Mastodon, believing that Mastodon is a good product, but this product itself cannot represent the future of social networks. What can represent the future of this track is the ActivityPub protocol.
Back to our topic, both Threads and Mastodon use and are based on the ActivityPub protocol. What is so special about it?
Allow users to travel between islands
In the social future outlined by traditional social media giants, our Twitter account data is controlled by Twitter, Instagram account data is controlled by Instagram, and Youtube account data is controlled by Youtube. Each social media company is an isolated island, each social media platform requires a separate account registration, and social media companies cannot exchange account data.
ActivityPub's solution to this problem is simple and direct: each server (instance) is similar to an email server, helping users receive and send emails and hosting identities. It standardizes the communication between servers, allowing freely joined servers to connect to each other; it also standardizes the communication between clients and servers, allowing users to access different servers on the same APP. This provides a lot of freedom for both server operators and users.
In this way, users of a social network using the ActivityPub protocol can travel between islands.
Looking back at the years since the birth of social networks, there have been a series of social network protocols that emphasize openness: OStatus, pump.io, Open Social, Pubsubhubbub, WebFinger, ActivityStreams, XMPP, RSS, OpenID, etc., and I believe that most of them are not well known to people. At certain times, even some technology giants also support these protocols.
The design idea of ActivityPub can be traced back to the birth of social networks. The original idea came from Fediverse. The idea of Fediverse is also very simple: a group of servers form a divided network and send and receive information to each other. Based on this idea, different software and protocols such as GNU social, OStatus, and Mastadon were derived. It can be said that ActivityPub has accumulated nearly 20 years of experience in exploring distributed social networks.
ActivityPub was first released five years ago, and after drawing on the experience and design of software such as GNU social and protocols such as OStatus in the Fediverse, it became a W3C recommendation. W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is essentially the governing body of the Web, responsible for overseeing the standards of protocols. ActivityPub defines a decentralized social network protocol for client applications and the servers that connect to them. The benefit to users is interoperability between services that adopt the protocol.
Specifically, Flipboard and Medium also set up a Mastodon server on ActivityPub and started inviting some users and curators to post on the main platform. As long as the server is ActivityPub-compliant, anyone can follow my Flipboard and Medium accounts from Mastodon without having to create an account or download a new app.
Meanwhile, if people like a Flipboard post from ActivityPub, it can be embedded on a Flipboard page, or even displayed in the original creator's Mastodon app. After posting a comment, the content will appear as a Mastodon reply.
This is not simply embedding content, but true interoperability.
If Threads and Mastodon are interconnected, the content posted on Threads will not be visible on Mastodon if it is deleted. This is because a delete event will be passed to other activity pub instances, but if an instance does not support delete, it can still be retained.
In addition to Threads and Mastodon, social networks currently using the ActivityPub protocol include: Nextcloud: a confederation-style service for file hosting; PeerTube, a confederation-style service for video; Friendica social network software implemented ActivityPub in version 2019.01; Mobilizon, event planning software from Framasoft; Pixelfed, a confederation-style photo sharing platform similar to Instagram; Pleroma is an ActivityPub-compatible, low-resource microblogging platform; and Misskey is an open source decentralized microblogging service.
Of course, ActivityPub is far from perfect at present, and there is a huge room for improvement. It also often makes mistakes and may even be killed by corporate interests and malicious technology. In today's race to reshape social media, there are many players besides ActivityPub: social upstarts such as Artifact and Substack Notes are already building their own closed platforms, Jack Dorsey, who left Twitter, supported new social protocols BlueSky and Nostr, and the hot social protocols Farcaster and Lens in the Web3 circle were also born one after another.
Each emerging protocol hopes to create its own open protocol and lead the social track. But why did Threads, a Web2 giant, choose the ActivityPub protocol?
Why did Threads, a Web2 giant, choose ActivityPub?
The first thing we can think of is that the use of ActivityPub, especially the communication standard between servers, can expand Meta's original social network, help communicate with other servers, and allow users to reach more people.
Matters-lab co-founder Liu Guo agrees with this view. In his opinion, ActivityPub is currently the most mature and widely used decentralized social protocol. As a latecomer, Threads can make good use of its original network effect by choosing ActivityPub.
In a conversation with BlockBeats, Liu Guo said: "Compared to several other similar decentralized protocols, such as Nostr and AT Protocol, ActivityPub is mainly mature and is also a w3c recommended standard. ActivityPub has many clients and a very complete vocabulary that can be used to define almost all product logic. At the same time, the mental model is also very simple (actor model). Compared with other ActivityPub clients, Mastodon mainly has a slightly better UI/UX, and integrates several other protocols in a suitable way (such as web finger)."
In addition, what other reasons made Threads, which came from a Web2 giant, choose ActivityPub? Liu Guo believes that Meta is also aware that users care about privacy and data ownership, especially after Twitter was acquired, so it chose to use a decentralized social protocol.
So, what does Threads’ choice of ActivityPub mean for decentralized social protocols or web3 protocols?
Liu Guo believes that this is a good reminder to return to the essence. It seems that Meta knows very well what users need. Users need a good user experience and a social protocol that can connect multiple clients, and blockchain is not needed to achieve these. Blockchain can provide a good identity system, but it needs to be linked with the social protocol under the chain to be useful to users, and the latter is already a relatively mature field and idea.