Mastodon or Threads? Why Not Both?

Threads took a big step towards interoperability with the Fediverse this week when they enabled federation on three specific Threads accounts belonging to the Head of Instagram and two software engineers. For now, it's a one-way thing. You can follow and see the posts from any of these three Threads users from Mastodon, but that's it.

This led to a great deal of spirited debate, especially on the Mastodon side. Suffice to say, some think Threads should be blocked from federating, while others are welcoming Threads with open arms.

At the same time, Threads opened up access to people in the European Union (EU). Since the launch of threads earlier this year, EU residents had been blocked from signing up and using the service.

Welcoming the EU masses in generated a lot of buzz on Threads, and starting the federation ball rolling generated a lot of buzz on Mastodon.

As an avid Mastodon user, that left me conflicted. There are a bunch of people on Threads who I would love to follow but that means devoting some time to Threads in addition to Mastodon. I tried Threads a few months back and stopped posting on Mastodon for a bit while I spent more time over there. That turned out badly...I never found the community that I had on Mastodon over on Threads.

Threads and Mastodon are different. They are both micro-blogging services that are very similar to Twitter. But they have a different vibe and different people.

So this time, I'm just going to wade back into Threads in addition to Mastodon. The idea is to develop a list of good people to follow there and to do some limited interaction as well. When federation opens up to everyone, I'll take that list of accounts and follow them from Mastodon instead.

In the meantime, I've got both apps on my phone and both services pinned in my Arc favourites. It's nice to see more and more familiar names and faces using Threads, and it's also nice to be able to continue to post and interact with the many people I follow on Mastodon.