Horary 0126: When Will Threads Launch ActivityPub Support?
Overview
My spiritual practice and writing are intimately bound up with the future of the internet and social media, so much so that one of my first public horaries was my prediction of the death of Twitter, which I found to be correct in every sense that was meaningful to me. The decisions I’ve made about online media and relationships since then have all been based in one specific hope for the emergence of a truly better alternative. As unlikely as it seemed, when I heard that Meta’s 𝕏 competitor, Threads — which launched in July 2023 — planned to support the ActivityPub protocol and thus be interoperable with Mastodon — the decentralized social media application I have been using from a self-hosted server since Elon Musk bought Twitter — I felt like my dreams for the internet were finally about to come true.
Of course, people who have paid attention to Meta (née Facebook) at all, ever, had every reason to doubt it would happen.
As the one-year mark since Musk’s Twitter acquisition approached — and as I began to grow weary of pretending to be excited to participate in Threads while still treating my Mastodon account as home — I began to yearn to know when (or if) this would actually come to pass. Meta staff kept saying they were working on it, but precise timelines were not forthcoming, and other seemingly far less important features were getting more attention. On October 20, 2023, I decided to cast this horary to relieve myself of the uncertainty.
Judgment
I assigned myself the ascendant ruler, Mars — dignified at home but hidden in the 12th house of isolation — and the Moon — in exile in Capricorn but succedent in the 2nd house and applying to benefic Venus. These both described my situation very well; Mars is comfortable where he is but invisible, the Moon is far from where she wants to be, but something good is coming to her.
I gave Meta/Threads the Sun as ruler of the midheaven, the entity with the power in this situation. The Sun is also isolated in the 12th — as Threads was isolated without its promised interoperability — he is low in dignity in his fall in Libra, and he is diminished by the South Node. However, that is changing soon; the Sun is only a few degrees away from leaving fall and going into Scorpio, where he will increase in affinity for Mars, my primary significator. Mercury, natural ruler of technology, is also just separating from their conjunction with the Sun, as though showing that engineering on this project has already begun.
Immediately after the Sun enters Scorpio, he makes contact with Saturn in 3º43', just shy of 4º. I noted Saturn’s rulership of the 3rd house of neighborhood and community; if I had to assign the fediverse (the name for the world of social media applications that use ActivityPub) to an astrological house, it would unquestionably be the 3rd. Saturn also rules the 4th, signifying my home, and the lord of the 4th in a horary also traditionally signifies “the end of the matter.” The Moon — my secondary significator — has affinity for Saturn by virtue of being in Capricorn. In short, Saturn radically signifies the outcome I wanted, and the significator of Meta/Threads would make contact with it in about 4º.
By horary timing rules, that ~4º gives us the number of units of time. To determine the units, we consider the modality of the sign and the angularity of the house of the applying significator. The Sun is in a cardinal sign and a cadent house; these are the two indications of the “short” timeframe, and both of those conditions must be met in order to judge the timing as “short” rather than “medium.” In this question, the reasonable short/medium/long units of time seemed to me to be weeks/months/years. This would mean that Threads would launch ActivityPub in about four weeks from the question, or around November 17, 2023.
Outcome
There was an incredible amount of technology industry news on November 17, 2023. The board of OpenAI tried and failed to oust CEO Sam Altman, and Elon Musk finally showed enough public personal support for judeophobic conspiracy theory evil that major corporate advertisers such as Apple, Disney, Comcast, Warner Bros Discovery, and others stopped advertising on 𝕏. If I were a big tech company trying to launch something, I would not have done so in this environment either.
As the days continued to pass without Threads launching ActivityPub support, I decided to mark this horary as incorrect. I was not yet ready to write it up, though. The fact that there was such astounding and relevant tech news on the exact predicted date suggested to me that there were more shoes to drop here, that I didn’t yet know how to write it up because I didn’t have the full picture.
Then, on December 13, 2023, it happened. Meta began to test integration with ActivityPub by making some of its key staffers’ posts available over the protocol. I actually saw the final, official announcement in my Mastodon client rather than on Threads. I cannot tell you how good that felt. This test was part of Threads’ rollout in the European Union the next day, suggesting — as I suspected all along — that interoperability via an open protocol was a strategic move by Meta to bring it into better compliance with European data privacy laws — an entirely sensible reason for the company to do all this rather than some sort of too-good-to-be-true entirely altruistic motive. You know what? It’s a win-win.
The actual timing between the date of my horary and the launch of ActivityPub support was 54 days, or 7.7 weeks.
Analysis
Today, upon consultation with my council of advisors, I decided to revise my ruling on this judgment from wrong to right. I understand this might seem wiggly to some readers, but I stand behind it.
I always follow my teachers in disclaiming that timing rules in horary are fuzzy. I think the best way to explain it is that they show the unfolding of events from a certain perspective — i.e. that of the querent and the astrologer — but the kinds of astrology that can really pinpoint the timing of global events are far more complex and require far more perspectives. You can go back through my write-ups and see how it functions. On little personal matters, it tends to be pretty freakin’ close. On bigger or more interpersonal ones, it gets a little fuzzier. On this matter, the fate of everyone who uses social media is in the balance, and that’s rather complicated.
Still, what I saw in this chart was, “It’s going to happen soon, in a few weeks,” and that was pretty damn exciting for something I felt in the pit of my stomach would happen in months or years, if ever. On a scale from “soon” to “never in your wildest dreams,” I feel like 7.7 weeks is pretty close to four. So I’m calling it a win.
You are welcome to @ me on Mastodon if you would like to take issue with that.
