Hacker News Reader

Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

Why don’t they do it already, then? They have massive engineering resources. The software Mastodon uses is totally open, not some locked up trade secret that would require years of negotiations.

If Meta wanted to, Threads would already talk to Mastodon.

View on HN

Because their target is Twitter, and the people fleeing it. So time to market is critical. A PM would be laser focused on shipping a product with the feature set needed to do that as quickly as possible. Integrating with the fediverse doesn't help that, so it probably not high on the priority list, even if they genuinely want do integrate with it.

It's been pretty difficult to scale Mastodon to even hundreds of thousands of users per instance when the users are following others across thousands of instances. Scaling that up to 30 million users is not easy. And you can tell the initial launch was rushed based on the limited app-only roll out, minimal features, and broken website. It's plausible that they will work on features and user growth first.

Maybe it’s because the app was just an idea 7 months ago. Maybe they’re working on scaling their user base with an MVP while slowly adding new features? Also it was explicitly stated by Zuck and Mosseri that this is an instagram product and is being worked on by the instagram team. It’s not something that every Meta employee and their best friend have a hand in.

Threads doesn’t even have a proper timeline yet. Last I heard you can’t even see your followed accounts. The database is directly built on top of Instagram’s as well.

ActivityPub integration is the least of their worries.

It seems likely that Threads launched slightly early, to take advantage of Twitter shooting itself in the foot particularly dramatically last week.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com