Threads’ Federation Is a One-Way Mirror—and the Shades Are Half-Drawn
When Threads announced plans to federate with the Fediverse in mid-2023, instance admins across the network weighed whether to federate with Meta preemptively or block it outright. At woof.group, an instance serving queer and leather communities, the decision was to wait and see.
The hope was that federation might soften Meta’s historically rigid moderation culture. For over a decade, Facebook and Instagram have been hostile ground for queer, trans, and sex-worker communities. The 2014 “Real Name” policy created real-world harm for trans people and drag queens who needed to separate their legal identity from their public persona. Account suspensions have been regular, inconsistent, and opaque—sometimes a swimsuit crosses the line, sometimes full nudity does not. Maintaining backup accounts preemptively became standard practice in some circles.
Federation offered a more nuanced possibility: Threads could keep a conservative environment on its own turf while still letting its users interact with people on instances with different norms. Most of my real-life friends remain on Meta’s platforms, and I’d like to see their posts again. That scenario is technically plausible. Meta’s reported 275 million monthly active users on Threads and more than three billion across its other services dwarfs the Fediverse’s roughly one million MAUs—not a burdensome scale difference for processing, storage, or even added moderation staff. Meta has committed to the engineering work required for broad federation, and it has no shortage of funds.
None of that matters now. A year and a half later, Threads appears barely half-federated. Users must manually enable the “Fediverse Sharing” option to publish posts externally, and even then the conversation doesn't travel both ways. Threads users can see replies from outside, but cannot respond, mention accounts on other instances, or follow anyone beyond Threads. For syndication it may work; for conversation, it is effectively broken.
A Blocklist That Says More Than It Needs To
Even without the ability to participate in wider conversation, Threads has already blocked a broad range of instances where gay and leather communities gather. The blocklist includes hypno.social, rubber.social, 4bear.com, nsfw.lgbt, kinkyelephant.com, kinktroet.social, barkclub.xyz, mastobate.social, and kinky.business, along with several now-defunct instances such as bear.community, gaybdsm.group, and gearheads.social. The list also encompasses more broadly queer-friendly spaces like bark.lgbt, super-gay.co, gay.camera, and gaygeek.social, plus sex-positive servers including nsfwphotography.social, nsfw.social, and net4sw.com. The stated reason for these blocks is that they “violated our Community Standards or Terms of Use.”
Other blocked instances—fisting.social, mastodon.hypnoguys.com, abdl.link, qaf.men, and social.rubber.family—allegedly have “no publicly accessible feed.” That rationale is dubious at best. mastodon.hypnoguys.com, for instance, maintains the usual Mastodon publicly accessible local feed.
These instances are hardly hotbeds of spam or harassment. woof.group federates with most of them without issue. Their media policies are typically reasonable and enforced, requiring sensitive-media flags for explicit content. Those policies are, in practice, looser than Threads’ (woof.group allows butts), yet many of their accounts and posts would be entirely unobjectionable under Threads’ own rules.
It is surprising that woof.group is not yet on the Threads blocklist. Its users post similar content, and its content policies are broadly likewise—several of the blocked instances adopted woof.group’s specific policy language. Size does not seem to be the criterion: Threads blocks servers with fewer than ten MAUs, while woof.group has over seven hundred.
A Neighborhood That Stays Just Out of Reach
Whatever Threads’ internal reasoning—and I haven't had insight into Meta’s decision-making for the better part of a decade—the pattern is clear. Meta’s services remain distinctly uncomfortable with sex, and sexual expression is a vibrant part of gay culture. woof.group was started in part to provide a space moderated with that subculture in mind, but with a policy designed to compromise with normative sensibilities so that the space could stay connected to a broader public. That balance has held for nearly five years, with open federation across most of the Fediverse.
Threads appears to be intent on walling its users off entirely from these communities, making “bad gays” invisible. If Threads were a taxi service, it would not take you South of Market.
