It’s a small advance, but one that speaks to Meta’s enginerring team paying attention to how the fediverse community is trying to educate Threads users about the possibilities.
The fediverse is now something that you can evangelize about. Its turning into a buzzword ...
The official story is that Meta is worried about being sued by people suddenly seeing their content pushed to some random website without their consent if it's enabled by default, so they won't risk enabling it by default. At least not before the fediverse is huge enough that everything you post going everywhere on the internet is the expected behaviour.
Fair enough really. I wouldn't want to be sued for that either, and they obviously cannot expect Congress to understand.. anything.
It is a fair position in the sense that it's technically within their legal rights to do whatever the fuck they want, but it is a feeble sham compared to the full and well-behaved fedi interoperability they should've had from the start since that was how it was sold from to their users from the beginning.
If they some day get there, I would still be open to considering federating with it. For now "it’s an ongoing process" as they carefully tweak things to find out how far they can go with the strictly limited access to the outside world they allow, while still keeping all their users captive.
If you were a threads user, you'd be unable to reply to this even if you did somehow see it. I welcome any of them to do so and prove me wrong.
Threads is for whoever Meta can sell it to, and I think it was pretty far along in its development before they actually committed to ActivityPub support.
The fact that it's been out for a year and federation is still only half-implemented suggests to me the decision to add it was pretty late in the development process, even if it was early in the marketing process.