Instagram Threads won’t share a timeline for account portability

Want Instagram themes truly integrate with fediversealso known as the open social web, to allow its users to interact with people on other services like Mastodon and move their account elsewhere if they decide they don’t like Meta’s rules anymore? Today, that answer remains unclear. Meta cannot yet confirm if and when account portability features will be added to its roadmap and pooling plans for the newer social network.

Asked for comment on the status of Threads’ efforts to port the accounts, a Meta spokesperson said those plans are “top notch,” but declined to share details about what’s next.

Meta’s decision to not currently prioritize account portability in the near future comes at a crucial time for the tech giant. The company recently announced end of its fact-checking program in favor of a Crowdsourced Community Notes feature, similar to X’s, with loose content moderation rules. It is also disabling the system that punishes misinformation by demoting that content on their platforms, according to the Platformer report. These changes could prompt users to reevaluate their relationship with Meta and perhaps consider moving their accounts to other services — something Threads said it plans to eventually allow.

At the same time, Gen Z users are so fed up with Meta’s monopoly on social media that instead of returning to Instagram Reels in preparation for the US ban on TikTok, they have moved en masse to another Chinese social network, called RedNote (Xiaohongshu). As of this week, some 700,000 TikTok users they joined RedNote while simultaneously joking on TikTok, which sees them saying goodbye to his “Chinese spy.”

Threads was meant to signal a new direction for Meta, in that it would no longer try to compete with the open social web, but join it. To date, there has been much debate over whether Meta’s move to fediverse, an open social network powered by the ActivityPub protocol, was made in good faith. Critics have expressed concern that Meta simply began to dominate the open web by quickly establishing itself as the largest unified client, giving it control over the future direction of the fediverse.

However, Meta has continued to roll out many integrations with fediverse on Threads, including things like the ability to fast of the cross to Mastodon and see replies by Mastodon users within Threads. He’s also done a lot of the heavy lifting on the user education side by including tutorials and explanations about fediverse within the Threads app and on the web.

However, one of the key components to becoming a federated app is adoption account portability. This means that if you don’t like the way your federated server does things, you can transfer your account elsewhere without losing your followers, followers, tags, lists and more.

ua Meeting in December 2023 between Meta representatives and members of the fediverse community, Meta shared that part of what prompted her move to fediverse was user concerns about the idea that Meta actually “owns” someone’s followers. (Although the meeting was not on the record, community members present were able to share what was discussed, as long as they did not directly quote or attribute statements to specific Meta individuals.)

ua abstract meeting by attendee Tom Coates, noted that Meta said it wanted to integrate with fediverse to help address user concerns about their social graph.

“They were looking for the ability to know they could move somewhere else if they needed to,” Coates wrote, though he added that “didn’t seem like the whole story.”

In light of Meta’s major policy change on fact-checking and moderation, it seemed like a good time to check out its fediverse program, given that there doesn’t seem to be any sign that the company has started working on the feature.

When asked for an update on the plan regarding account portability, a Meta spokesperson could not confirm that the topic was even on Threads’ agenda, let alone when it would be addressed.

Instead, they shared that account portability is “a top priority as we continue to integrate Fediverse,” and that there are “no additional details on the plan or timeline at this time.”

While Threads may still very well intend to add an account portability feature, it’s understandably not a priority as, at least for now, the company aims to keep its users on Threads. The social network has grown to become the largest unified application (if it were fully unified), with 300 million monthly active userscompared to 275 million in November. It also has 100 million daily active users.

This story was updated after publication with the correct number of TikTok users who joined RedNote, which is 700,000, not 700 million.