I think they may have realised that federating whilst they’re still not allowed to operate in the EU would hand hundreds of millions of EU users to independent instances.

You can follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon so I would assume it will also be possible from Threads if they federate with at least one Mastodon instance.

It’s not a very Reddit-like experience. I tested it on Mastodon by following a community here and it just spammed my feed with out of context replies so I unfollowed it fairly quickly.

But that experience is likely to improve? And no doubt Meta would like to kill Reddit with the same stone that kills Twitter.

Turbulent times ahead.