One possible answer can be teased out of a conversation between two Meta employees working on Threads and Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, whose company joined the fediverse with its support of ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon and others.

On McCue’s “Flipboard Dot Social” podcast, he spoke to two leaders building the Threads experience, director of product management Rachel Lambert and software engineer Peter Cottle. McCue raised questions and concerns shared by others working on fediverse projects, including what Meta’s involvement means for this space, and whether Meta would eventually abandon Threads and the fediverse, leaving a destroyed ecosystem in its wake.

Lambert responded by pointing out that Meta has other open source efforts in the works, so “pulling the rug” on its fediverse work would come at a “very high cost” for the company, since it would be detrimental to Meta’s work trying to build trust with other open source communities.

For example, the company is releasing some of its work on large language models (LLMs) as open source products, like Llama.

In addition, she believes that Meta will be able to continue to build trust over time with those working in the fediverse by releasing features and hitting milestones, as it did recently with the launch of the new toggle that lets Threads users publish their posts to the wider fediverse, where they can be viewed on Mastodon and other apps.

But more importantly, McCue (and all of us) wanted to know: Why is Meta engaged with the fediverse to begin with?

Meta today has 3.24 billion people using its social apps daily, according to its Q1 2024 earnings. Does it really need a few million more?

Lambert answered this question indirectly by explaining the use case for Threads as a place to have public conversations in real time. She suggested that connecting to the fediverse would help users find a broader audience than those they could reach on Threads alone.

That’s only true to a point, however. While the fediverse is active and growing, Threads is already a dominant app in the space. Outside of Threads’ now 150 million monthly active users, the wider fediverse has just north of 10 million users. Mastodon, a top federated app, has fallen below 1 million monthly active users after Threads launched.

So if Threads joining the fediverse is not about significantly widening creators’ reach, then what is Meta’s aim?

The Meta employees’ remarks hinted at a broader reason behind Meta’s shift to the fediverse.