Threads does not (yet) publish ActivityPub fully

With titles like “Meta Launches First Stage of Threads Interoperability via ActivityPub“, and any number of variants about how testing has started, as well as a well-published timeline for publishing starting in December, as well as Zuckerberg’s post on the subject. Well it’s a done deal, right?

Caveat: None of the articles have tested it. Some include this caveat at the end, noting they’ll “update” the post when they try it. Since all these posts are from December, smart money is that they’ve long since been forgotten by the content mill.

To that end, let’s actually try.

(NB: I’m completely sidestepping any discussion on the good/evil/bad/whatever on Threads and the Fediverse discussion. As far as I’m concerned, I want to read things)

Is a profile published?

Threads does, actually, publish a webfinger endpoint! We can find it at https://threads.net/well-known/webfinger?resource= and if we query it with a randomly selected account, it even gives a well-formatted response.

{
  "subject": "acct:zuck@threads.net",
  "links": [
    {
      "href": "https://threads.net/ap/users/17841401746480004/",
      "rel": "self",
      "type": "application/activity+json"
    }
  ]
}

So far so good. We now have a reference to the activity feed of this completely random user. We just need to fetch it, right?

{
  "success": false,
  "error": "Not found"
}

Well, that was fun. This leads to a bit of a discoverability problem, but before I get to that, I couldn’t help but notice that while the Zuck himself is a random user ID just like the rest of us plebs, some people have allocated more personalized activitypub feeds

{
  "subject": "acct:mosseri@threads.net",
  "links": [
    {
      "href": "https://www.threads.net/ap/users/mosseri/",
      "rel": "self",
      "type": "application/activity+json"
    }
  ]
}

Good on them.

The Discoverability Problem

Meta’s intent with Threads is that profiles should be able to toggle ActivityPub on as an opt-in (or potentially opt-out later on, who knows). As a concept, that makes Threads a non-starter for discoverability. If I google someone I’m interested in, and they have a Threads profile, there’s no real easy way to follow.

This is probably going to be the biggest determining factor. Is there going to be (yet another) poorly functional “Follow” button on threads? Will it be asking me to create a Threads account by default? Or the alphabet soup of Reddit/Pinterest/upvote/etc buttons we used to have?

This is the perennial problem. How do you expand reach. For Threads, the challenge is going to be to make it evident that an account is available in ActivityPub format. Right now, it’s not; and, even worse, thanks to all the posts around it makes it looks like it is possible.

It’s not. Not yet. Threads does NOT publish ActivityPub.