Personally I don't think this is particularly exciting. Buy in from major social media entities at this stage is fine, but what matters, in my opinion, is the overall growth of the network outside of these incumbent social networking giants. I appreciate that they appear to be playing ball, but if the fediverse is successful on a scale that matters this will be a minor footnote.

No doubt that the existing major networks would prefer to be able to enclose the budding commons that the fediverse is starting to create, but I'm hopeful that people will choose community and/or locally operated alternatives rather than continue buying into the mega corporate offerings.

Will they extend this to Instagram? Until then (and even after) I'd be suspicious of their intentions. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...

Instagram is moving towards being a TikTok competitor so it doesn't make much sense.

Either way their intentions are pretty easy to understand.

ActivityPub integration keeps regulators off their back and allows external content to appear on Threads which they can then monetise alongside ads.

No "and vice versa" yet. Threads can broadcast over ActivityPub but it doesn't receive back anything yet. They are working on it.