Restricted access to Threads content is preventing RSS feed generation
Resolved
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of the Threads parent company Meta, has announced that the content on Threads will be accessible using ActivityPub. ActivityPub is an open protocol used by many other widely-distributed applications that allow their public content to be accessible without creating an account.
However, despite claiming to embrace the ActivityPub protocol, Threads has restricted its content from being accessed, making RSS feed generation inconsistent, error-prone, and ultimately, unreliable.
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Accessing Threads content through the API requires a Threads account, which excludes it from being an option for Open RSS feeds. To generate reliable RSS feeds, the content source needs to be publicly available by our automated systems, without requiring any account creation.
During our tests to obtain Threads content for RSS feeds without using the API, we've found requested content becomes increasingly slow after just a few attempts. In some cases, either no content is returned or an error is raised. Sending even more requests resulted in eventually every request causing an error. We're unable to determine the cause, or whether this is the result of some rate-limiting or a block, because responses provide no relevant information.
Unfortunately, this level of inconsistency when obtaining Threads content is not sufficient nor sustainable for Open RSS feeds to reliably be generated from its content. We are looking into other options.
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We've been able to get Threads RSS feeds working. However, we're still testing out behavior to ensure they can remain stable and reliable.
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Although feed content can be cleaned up a bit (which we're working on), feeds have been working and stable. Marking issue as resolved.