Threads in the fediverse—why brands should start planning for a decentralized internet

Gen Z Voices is a new series exploring the Gen Z perspective on marketing, technology, social media and the future of the ad industry. Submit your essays here. Will Threads overtake Twitter as the No. 1 microblogging site? As someone who never saw the Twitter hype in the first place and who has some real concerns about Meta’s disregard for user privacy, I’m more interested in a cage match between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg than in testing another Twitter lookalike. But I wouldn’t be a very good digital marketer if I didn’t give it a shot. When I made an account on Threads, I noticed something that made me even more excited than the prospect of seeing two billionaires make each other cry: “Future versions of Threads will work with the fediverse, a new type of social media network that allows people to follow and interact with each other on different platforms, such as Mastodon.” The “fediverse” (for the record, I hate the name) is a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe” and it may be the direction social media is heading. For almost 20 years, people have been settled into a handful of social networks, only occasionally adding something new, like TikTok, to the rotation. Increasingly, users are becoming dissatisfied with these restrictions, especially as we’ve seen that these platforms can change drastically with no input from the user base. But the appeal of remaining connected to our peers is still stronger than the urge to delete our accounts. People have stuck with Twitter for so long because leaving to a new platform would require rebuilding their network from scratch unless everyone agreed to migrate to the same site. Imagine trying to pick a restaurant for dinner with 100 million friends instead of six. To solve this issue, Threads did two things. By connecting the site to Instagram, users could start with a built-in network. Secondly, the company has plans to make Threads compatible with ActivityPub protocol (otherwise known as fediverse), which allows for seamless interaction between different platforms. The three major decentralized protocols are ActivityPub, AT Protocol (developed by Bluesky) and Nostr. They each have slight technical differences that are important to developers. But we regular users need to know only that Meta has plans to throw its weight behind ActivityPub. Ad Age Gen Z Contributor Column We welcome Gen Zers to submit fresh takes exploring Gen Z within the ad industry Learn more here If you’re like me, you might still have difficulty wrapping your head around Web3 and decentralization. As David Pierce, an editor at The Verge, described it, “Email is the best example of how this system works now: it’s based on open protocols that lots of services tap into, so while there are many email apps with different features and quality levels, your contacts carry over and will always work.” You don’t need an Outlook account and a Gmail account and a Hotmail account just to email everyone in your network; in the same way, you only need one account on the fediverse. According to an article on the Instagram help center, your content and information may be shared with servers hosted on other platforms that use ActivityPub protocol if you interact with content or have followers from them. If you have a private profile, you can approve or deny follow requests before people on or off Threads can follow you. Mastodon is the most popular site that uses ActivityPub. Just like a traditional website, people make an account, post, upload pictures and send messages. The fediverse allows for those posts, pictures and messages to be shared seamlessly across other platforms using the same protocol. Threads does not currently have support for the ActivityPub protocol, but it is one of the biggest platforms with plans to implement it, and this has brought the concept into the zeitgeist. No longer is decentralization a buzzword just for tech-bros and cryptocurrency enthusiasts. There is still a question of whether Threads truly will be decentralized. Users are not expected to be able to host their own servers on Threads (as you can on Mastodon), limiting their control over their data. This lack of user control and independence hinders Threads' ability to fully embrace decentralization. Meta will eventually have to decide what's more important to it: user experience or user data. Meta and Threads collect a lot of data. Including but not limited to health and fitness, financial info, contact info, purchases, location and identifiers. While Threads does not currently show ads or sponsored posts, the company says ads will be how it monetizes the site. For marketers and advertisers, joining Threads seems obvious when considering the mass data collection and analysis currently being done by Meta. However, there is one snag in the plan (sorry I couldn’t resist including a sewing reference). If Threads does join the fediverse, users could easily leave Threads and take their followers and content with them, which may impact how effective advertising on Threads could be. Mastodon, for example, does not include any functionality to display ads and Mastodon users wouldn't be able to see ads from Threads on Mastodon even while getting to enjoy Threads content. Many of the other platforms already part of the fediverse do not show ads either. Despite the growing prevalence of “ad-free” spaces and resistance to traditional social media advertising, there could be a bright side for marketers. Organic reach could explode in the next few years and have a significantly better return on investment than paid ads. According to Forbes, more than a third of Gen Z users follow brands they like on social media and approximately one in four follow brands from which they’re considering purchasing. There’s no need to target advertisements to social media users when they already self-select and seek out brands in the same way they connect with friends, celebrities and influencers. On top of that, instead of having to create and maintain accounts on a dozen sites, a brand could choose one platform, focus its energy on making quality content for it and still have a wide reach provided by the fediverse. It remains to be seen how the battle for users’ attention spans plays out, but marketers would be wise to start planning a strategy that could adapt to a decentralized internet. Subscribe to Ad Age Sign up now for the latest industry news and analysis Click here

Threads in the fediverse—why brands should start planning for a decentralized internet

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