Am I the only one a bit confused as to what Threads has to do with Lemmy, beyond them both using ActivityPub..? Like, these are completely different kinds of websites, Lemmy is a Reddit clone and Threads is a Twitter clone. What purpose would federation serve?

[–] matt@lemmy.world 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

Because they use ActivityPub, both of them can potentially interact with each other (post, viewing, following, liking, boosting, etc). There's no way to stop Threads from being able to interact fully with Lemmy if it's something Meta wanted to implement. Mastodon can already interact with Lemmy directly by following communities, posting to communities, and interact with posts/comments. Lemmy doesn't go the other way though because it isn't implemented, but it could be.

Any ActivityPub software/platform/website can interact with any other ActivityPub software/platform/website if it so wants to, because the backend of things like posts/comments/communities/etc are the same across every single platform if they choose to implement them, the difference between the ActivityPub platforms is how they choose to show you information and how you interact with it.

Edit: Made a few edits for clarification.

[–] TimewornTraveler@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

what's Activity Pub? you're the first person to teach me that name

[–] matt@lemmy.world 11 points 2 years ago

For a non-tech answer, it's basically the "language" used between these websites to make them talk to each other.

If a website uses ActivityPub, it can fetch information (and send information) to other sites that are using ActivityPub in a specific way that's designed for social media.

Another example of this would be SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) which is what e-mail uses so that different e-mail servers (outlook, yahoo, gmail, etc) can all talk to each other seamlessly.

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