Launching an Instagram Thread with support for ActivityPub in the future is a “clear win” for decentralized social media and supports the idea that decentralized social media is the future, says Mastodon’s founder.

Plus support for the ActivityPub Instagram Thread will mean people can switch shifts more easily, Mastodon founder Eugene Roshko believes It is a step towards social media that exploits users less. “We’ve been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years. This is a step forward for people locked into these platforms to move to better service providers, which in turn puts pressure on these platforms to provide better services and less exploitation.”

This is the net profit, he says. “This is a clear victory for our cause, and we hope it will be one of many in the future.” Any Mastodon server administrator will be able to choose not to trust the Instagram Thread servers and thus block those servers. As a result, Mastodon servers do not need to work with threads.

Rochko thinks it’s possible Meta could try an “embrace extinguish” strategy using Instagram Thread. He made the comparison with XMPP, a cross-platform chat protocol that was popular in 2008. He is not afraid of it now, because ActivityPub and Mastodon are already known more than XMPP at that time. “Well, even if ThreadPub abandons ActivityPub in the future, we’ll end up exactly where we are today.”

Meta released Instagram threads on Thursday, but not in Europe. On Wednesday, the company announced that it will support ActivityPub in Themes. Threads is a version of Twitter’s Meta. The relationship between threads and decentralized social media is also discussed in this week’s Tweakers Podcast.