It has been a full generation since the last time I can remember the definitive, most credible perspectives on a major tech news story happening across multiple people's personal blogs, but amazingly, the open web renaissance has brought us the kind of human moment that hasn't been seen since the early 2000s.

With Meta/Facebook/Instagram moving quickliy to federate their Threads platform into the rapidly-expanding fediverse, many are curious about how they're engaging with the community, and what their strategy might be. Given that sincere interest, it's been remarkable to note that Tom Coates' blog post on Threads' meeting with community members, along with Johannes Ernst's own take, are the definitive perspectives on the way that the industry titan is trying to engage. Both were informed by their direct participation in an otherwise closed-door meeting, with a completely different context than the usually carefully-manicured press events that are used to brief journalists about a product.

It's remarkable that this story wasn't broken by industry trade press (much of which is increasingly captured by the major tech companies, or at least beholden to its constraints of access or embargoes) and wasn't dictated directly by Meta's PR team, but was instead discussed by practitioners who do the actual work of engaging with the community and with the underlying technologies. I can't wait to see the next wave of similar conversations, centered around open formats and the open web, that is driven by conversation amongst and between the personal sites of individual participants — because that's how many of the best innovations of the first era of the social web happened.